Desert map for a commission
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This is a region of the world I am creating for a commission. It is a desert land with a Nile river, and mountains to the east and west.
I would welcome all critique. I also have questions about currents and winds - Wyvern is needed here I think.
I am putting up the desert map, and an altitude map and unfinished climate map to help with working out currents and winds.
Comments
This looks great. I want to try a desert map now. I like the cliff that runs NE from Thirst's End and dunes near the Watli Oal River. Have you thought about placing a small directional shadow on them to suggest some dimensionality?
A few observations about your mountains:
These are just flavor suggestions, your map is great and it's obvious you spent time and thought on the small details.
Sorry Quenten, I'm not sure there's enough information here to make detailed real-world comparisons with to suggest possible sea currents and prevailing winds.
The fairly narrow global belts of desert right across both northern and southern hemispheres suggests there's something odd happening generally, given the vast expanse of oceans here, which in many places are a lot deeper over vaster areas than Earth's (scarcely any part of Earth's oceans are deeper than 8,000 metres, for instance). That should suggest there'd be plenty of water available for rainfall everywhere, especially on any near-coastal areas where the prevailing winds are onshore. If the planet rotates in the same direction as Earth, that should imply west-facing coasts would be more likely to see higher rainfall tallies, but it looks as if it's more the east-facing ones that are somewhat favoured by this (albeit dependent on the prevailing winds, however).
Aside from the rotation issue, it might be useful to add some latitude lines, such as for whatever latitudes the tropics are at, the equator and polar circles, for example, and also some indication as to what parameters were used to generate the climate regimes (albeit with the latter, you could probably work out for yourself what the more likely prevailing winds at least might be).
Thanks. The deserts are placed at western ends, and at 15-35 deg N and S. Deserts can certainly occur besides huge amounts of water - west Sahara, Namibia, Atacama, West Australia. So I'll just 'fudge' the issue you mentioned. I will try to work out winds, including monsoons, and currents.
I think what made me wonder was the fact the deserts are in such clear strips extending west-east across so much of the map. Realistically, on Earth, only the Sahara matches the positioning and extent; Namib and Atacama are west-facing coastal but hardly extend inland at all (relatively), while Western Australia mostly starts inland to well inland of the coast. In the three southern hemisphere Earth cases, the prevailing winds are either offshore (West Australian winter) or south to north, so are somewhat "special cases" in that they don't have onshore winds bringing moisture in off the surrounding oceans.
The overall planetary layout you're using is not dissimilar to the geological Pangaea continent and Panthalassa Ocean on Earth, so you might find maps on the following pages of some use, albeit the circulation patterns are very simplified for obvious reasons (i.e. limited data available from geologic time): Britannica page for Panthalassa and Pangaea (scroll well down for the Pangaea maps - they're not the same as the Thalassa one near the top of the page); Wiley online paper on the Permo-Triassic (scroll down to Figure 1); and Figure 8 from a ResearchGate paper again on the Permo-Triassic. You should be able to source similarly approximate biome maps from the appropriate times from the period names online, I'd hope.
Thanks for this.
Hi Quenten. I've just read through some of Wyvern's comments and I wanted to add a few things, particularly around his insight that the land form is similar to Pangaea's. Pangaea was around for a long time and its climate changed due to several factors, but in general it was a much warmer place than the world we live in. It's also believed that in some eras it was prone to extremes - hot desert separated from tundra by narrow strips of milder weather, particularly in the south.
The following site might provide some guidance: http://www.buildyourownearth.com/byoe.html?e1=39&c1=4&v=pm . It allows you to view a number of climatic elements at different periods in the earth's history. I'd suggest for the planet you've presented either the Jurassic, Triassic, or Permian periods, based solely on the shape of the land mass. Myself, I'd look at the Permian.
I actually used maps I downloaded from this tool to develop the climate for a Pangaea like world I developed. I simply took the January and July maps and imported them as an overlay in fractal terrains, and then used it as a guide to develop bars of temperature and precipitation for my planet, smoothing out the results. Then I developed maps to chart the currents and wind directions, and had them modify the precipitation and temperature appropriately. I was pretty happy with the results.
Looking at the map you provided, I'd guess that the inland sea that your desert is on is large enough to develop its own current systems much like an ocean. I'm inclined to think that the current would move into your desert from the south, and that the result might be fertile coasts. It seems to me that given the size of the land mass to the west of this sea, there would be a high pressure zone over the land somewhere in the middle, as there is over Asia (I believe it's only in winter), which is a major contributing factor to monsoons. For that reason I'd suspect a more wet and dry situation over that coast, and it would likely also affect the area where your desert is.
Well, this is all random hypothesizing in the English manner, as Nietzsche put it. If I had the height map I'd be tempted to give it a go. Hope you're well.
Amazing map, Quenten!
Is the OAL supposed to be all caps?
Also, do you have any piece of lore on this? ?
I have read that India slamming into Asia created a whole host of climate issues, perhaps one of which was the creation of the Sahara. I don't remember when or what I read that gives me that impression.
I think your maps are fantastic Quenten, but when I see them I can't help thinking that with that art style you could do a geological map of a world. showing where the different ages of rock are, and hence where you may find gemstones, metal deposits (such as gold tin, lead), coal, and oil etc.
Just to show an insane level of detail.
The lore is by my client, so I am not free to put that on. I will rework the currents and winds to justify the desert placement (a bit back to front I know). And thanks for your likes, Wyvern, Autumn Getty, Dak and primo - encouragement and great critique.
To be honest, the extra water depth across these oceans makes direct comparisons with Earth a lot more difficult, as Earth has never had oceans so deep. Thus setting-up the winds and currents to fit the terrain better is probably no bad thing, as it would be possible to counter-argue just about any points that might be claimed as too unlike Earth.
At last, a Wyvern loophole. What a Dragon you are. ?
To Wyvern's point, even on Earth there are so many strange anomalies (most of them localized) that probably anything that doesn't fit could be explained by some odd detail (as is often done with hard-to-explain regions on the earth).
Regarding the extra water that Wyvern pointed out, I was thinking it would depend pressure systems, but it's quite possible the pressure systems would be quite different with extra water. I really don't know. I was going with the logic that rain would be likely to drop in more northern areas, since cold doesn't hold the rain, and would be mostly expended by the time it reached certain latitudes, which is the case on Earth.
The leading theory about the Sahara is that it is caused by changes in the tilt of the earth over cycles called Milankovitch cycles. There's an interesting theory that this led to a mechanism called the Sahara pump, in which organisms grow comfortable in a savannah environment, but then have to leave when the region dries up again. The last drying up occurred around the time that Egypt developed its first cities, and some people feel that this is the result of population pressure as people flooded the area due to droughts.
India slamming into Asia is responsible for the huge monsoon system centered on the Himalayas, though.
Ah. Thanks for the correction.
The extra water depth complicates matters for the ocean currents aside from surface weather patterns, mostly because we don't really understand how deep ocean currents work on Earth, so for a situation like this, it becomes - whatever you like, more or less!
Again, the Wyvern Wormhole...ooops, loophole. Thanks to everyone who has contributed to a most interesting worldbuilding discussion. Who knows, I may do another world for myself, with all these factors taken into account.
Hello! I am the client on this one and just found this most interesting thread. It is a marvel how intricate climates get! Thank you all for weighing in.
@Wyvern
@Wyvern and @Autumn Getty , so if I say the wind blows south to north (which would be convenient for river boats ;D ) over the southbound Oal, that's plausible? Or should it only do so seasonally? I'm grateful for your input.
If it helps, one ocean depth or another seems all the same to my lore. If the bathymetry Quenten has made means "winds do what I say they will do," then that's another feather in Quenten's genius cap. But I am also interested to understand what would be predicted for such a region independent of fictional boats, ha ha.
@Vir: There are a number of problems involved in understanding climate and how it would behave in circumstances for another planet than Earth with its current layout of continental landmasses, sizes and depths of ocean.
One is we don't really understand how Earth's climate works. There are a lot of theories and models, but many of them fall apart if we try to use them to explain the current Earth in any detail, and/or if we try to use them to explain what we understand about the geological past (this latter is a particularly major problem).
Another is that because we don't properly understand how our own planet's climate operates, when we try to use these theories and models to explain another planet's (and this has happened repeatedly in our own Solar System), they don't really work either.
So the further we get away from the current physical situation for Earth, the more guesswork is involved, essentially. (And there's a lot of guesswork involved in explaining the current situation already!)
Ocean depths different to Earth's create particular uncertainties, as it's clear there are things happening in Earth's deeper oceans that have huge effects planet-wide, but we don't really know why they happen. So when trying to look at a planet like this one, where great areas of the ocean are much deeper over far larger areas than Earth's, it gets to the point of either giving up, or just going with whatever you fancy!
Ocean currents, for example, can flow in completely different directions at different depths - a warm current might be flowing over or under a cold current behaving in this way too. Similar things happen in the atmosphere as well, so while that shouldn't be a surprise, it doesn't mean we really know why things are as they are.
If you need a south to north wind (maybe only seasonally), my advice would be simply invent what seems to you a good reason for why it happens, and if that involves something relating to Earth's climate/weather patterns, possibly only vaguely, just invoke that. If anybody's daft enough to question it, then obviously it's because it's also influenced by the planet's magical field!
If you need ideas based on what happens for Earth, I'd suggest taking a look at places online such as already suggested above here for the geological situation for Earth that's similar to your own planet, with things like the estimates for broad-scale current flows. If you can find a good-quality physical atlas showing similar things for either the past or present (which is a useful definition for "good quality"), that will be just as suitable, dependent on what you prefer.
Ok! Makes sense to me.
I have found prevailing winds trickier to figure out by analogy to real places than other aspects of climate. South Australia is the most similar in terms of latitude and coast shape. I found something more useful today. I found this today after trying more searches:
As far as the southern regions of the colony are concerned, we may say, speaking generally, that light winds and calms are a very distinctive characteristic. The prevailing wind in the summer is the S.E., varied by sea-breezes during the day. In the winter there are mostly dry, cold N.E. winds, broken at intervals by westerly and S.W. gales of moderate strength, squalls, and rain. ... In the interior, north of, say, latitude 30° [which is about 200km from the southern coast] to about 18° S., the prevailing wind all the year is the S.E.
So, although the discussion of rain makes me think the description is for southeastern Australia rather than the modern state of South Australia, I'm going with that. The point about the interior is particular helpful. 200km from the coast is almost all the cities on the map able to ride winds north and current south, year-round. Serendipitous.
I definitely think you could have winds moving from south to north. Wind patterns are actually incredibly complex, and the maps you see of prevailing winds are massive oversimplifications. I actually developed a system for figuring climates for worlds generated by fractal terrains, and after our discussion here I went and looked at the planet I've been mapping for a while now. At first I was confused by what I had done, thinking it was in massive error. So then I went and started going through it logically again and I figured why it was so strange, and it makes sense. Just mentioning it to point out that sometimes things that seem out of whack are actually well done when you consider them more closely.
Also, happy to have benefitted from Wyvern's understanding of deep sea currents. I have a tenuous grasp on how they work.
Neat! Always nice to have those moments of vindication, "Aww man, past-me worked for days on this. He thought he was so smart! ... Ah ha! Past-me was a genius."
Also, happy to have benefitted from Wyvern's understanding of deep sea currents. I have a tenuous grasp on how they work.
If I didn't misunderstand him completely, then you're in the best of company ;)
@Autumn Getty noted:
Also, happy to have benefitted from Wyvern's understanding of deep sea currents. I have a tenuous grasp on how they work.
Which is pretty much where almost everyone else is too! The snag is ocean currents seem to behave much like air currents in the atmosphere - so as with the prevailing wind diagrams, the charts you see are huge simplifications of the real situation. However, they're much harder to get accurate information on at the same level of detail as is possible for air currents/winds because of being undersea. The deeper you go in the ocean, the less data there is, because it becomes increasingly difficult to get equipment there with any useful regularity.
When you consider new animal species are found on pretty well every deep-dive into the unlit parts of the oceans (everything below roughly 200 metres/660 feet, so that's pretty well all of the oceans!), it's very obvious how appallingly little we know about what goes on there at all. Like the Coelacanth, believed extinct for 66 million years, yet still happily getting on with things and thriving today in Earth's oceans!
You know on a side note, I got interested in water deep underground when I was planning something for my group (and also thinking about the thing I did in the recent competition). Something I was thinking about was a whole campaign world underground, which I don't think has really been done in any substantial way, though there are interesting underground things semi-developed. So obviously, at least if its the standard races often seen in fantasy, you'd need water, so I looked into how large amounts of water could get underground. It was fascinating to learn that there is probably more water underground than there is in the oceans, and that much of the water has tiny pieces of diamond (and other minerals) in it.
By the way, I'm not talking about something like Hollow World (which is actually one of my favourite settings), but a true subterranean campaign world.
Anyway, thought it was interesting enough to share.
Subterranean water is one of the great bugbears of mining too, and the minerals in solution are what produce things like the wonderful museum beauty pieces of agate, and many other huge crystals.
I actually thought the Hollow World and Hollow Earth Expedition RPG settings were genuine subterranean worlds, but maybe you're meaning something more like the endless caverns and under-earth oceans of Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth? Hollow Earth Expedition at least does draw on the real-world theories about the Earth being hollow, which were particularly in-vogue around the 17th-18th centuries, and which passed subsequently into various fictional works. Wikipedia Hollow Earth page link - it does have a nice medieval-style drawing of the interior world as used in a late 19th century science-fiction novel!