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Message: <blockquote data-quote="argo" data-source="post: 1936422" data-attributes="member: 5752">Many good points here but I'll throw in my two cents anyway.  All this is off the top of my head but I hope you'll find it usefull.  An issue nobody has addressed yet is the atmospheric action.  Taking our earth as an example we have the phenenom of equatorial lows, Hadley cells, Subtropical highs, jet streams and polar fronts.  The equatorial region on earth recieves high ammounts of Insolation (sunlight) which for our puropses is simply energy.  Imagine that we follow a single air "packet" on its trip through the atmosphere.  The high energy reciepts cause moist air at the equator to rise (equatorial low pressure zone) and as it does so expand and dump its water; thus you have wet rainforests at the equator and tropical regions.  The air rises until it reaches an inversion layer in the atmosphere and then spreads out north and south.  Eventually the air will cool enough to begin contracting again and sink towards the earth, as it does so its pressure and temperature increase until at sea level you have a hot blast furnace of dense, dry air crashing down: the Subtropical High pressure zone.  This is one reason why on earth you find deserts in the subtropical latitudes.  The air at ground level again spreads out to north and south, following the path south the air picks up moisture as it moves southward towards the equator and starts over: this aciton completes the Hadley Cell; a pocket of tropical air bound between the equatorial low and subtropical high.  Looking at the high latitudes things look a little different.  The air over the poles is extremly cold compared to air in the mid-latitudes.  This translates to it being very dense and thus hugging the ground tightly, effectievly forming a dome of dense air over the poles: the Polar Front.  Where the polar front meets the mid-latitudes the compariatevly warm (less dense) and moist mid-latitude air is driven up the wall of the polar front much the same way it might go over a mountain range and with much the same effects: heavy precipitation all along the front.  Consequently little mid-latitude air breaches the polar "dome" and this accounts for the small ammount of precipitation we get at our poles; as was mentioned above many polar regions get little precipitation but have also loose little to evaporation thus they accimulate ice packs.  Mid-latitude air that rises over the polar front becomes the polar jet stream.So how might this apply to your world?  Well you defenaetly do want to start by making the polar regions a lower elevation than the equator in order to get your oceans.  Secondly, in order to have liquid oceans at the poles you will want the planet to recieve more insolation (closer to the sun, hotter temperatures) than our earth, this is fine as it will help establishing deserts in the lower latitudes but I don't think you will be boiling water at the equator: any planet that hot probaby couldnt' support life at all.  The Subtropical Highs would work perfectly for you: if you had a world with no tilt to the axis you would get subtropical highs with no seasonal variation thus curtailing seasonal storms (monsoons) that keep some subtropical regions on earth moist.  If the effect of these high pressure zones were stong enough then you would have large deserts covering most of the sub-tropical and lower-mid-latitudes.  You could have a thin band of equatorial rainforest or make the equatorial region a desert depending on how much water you allow to exist in the equatorial sytem at the start.  Looking at the high-mid-latitudes and polar regins I think it would look a little different from our earth.  The effect of the liquid polar oceans would preclude the existance of a polar front, I think.  Since oceans create more of a moderating effect on the atmosphere I think that you would not have the "cap" effect that we assoicate with the poles on earth and thus you would not get the violent storms along the polar front.  Instead you would have more of a costal effect that rings the entire mid-high-latitude.  Lets look at this as just one possibility: since you have the ocean covering the poles and extending down into lower latitudes (and greater insolation) I imagine that your dominant ocean currents will be upwellings of cold water along the coasts, surface warming, upper level currents moving poleward, and finally cooling and downwelling at the poles to repeat the cycles.  Cold upwellings along the coast would mimic the effects of cold polar ocean currents that we assoicate with western coasts on real world contients.  Fruthermore if you want polar "capstone" plates subducting under mid-latitude plates in a ring of fire effect that would produce geography similar to the western North American continent.So my advice to you is to look to the climate and ecosystems of the west-coast United States.  It varies with latitude from the deserts of southern califorina to the costal rain forests of oregon and washington.  Pick the ecosystem you like and set the coastline of your polar ocean at that same latitude as that ecosystem.  For some ecosystem variation introduce latitude variation along the coastline in the form of penesulas or interior ocean extensions.Hope that helps.</blockquote>

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