Vlürch wrote: ↑09 Dec 2023 14:48
Not sure if this is a quick question, but it doesn't feel worth making a new thread for, especially since I know it almost certainly doesn't have an
objective answer since it's already unrealistic to begin with, and pretty much anything can be handwaved, but... if you took landforms (ie. an archipelago that's IRL waaaayyy underwater) and made it so that it's above the surface (ie. as if the sea level was thousands of metres lower, but only at that point... as in the land was
elevated by that much, not that the sea level was lowered)... if the shape of the coastlines is about the same as it would be if the sea level was lowered, is it way too unrealistic for the actual landforms and geology and whatnot on the surface to be different from what would exist if the sea level was lowered?
If that's confusing, I guess a picture is worth a thousand words:
The left one is at least more or less what the actual topography under the water is like, the right one is what I came up with (some of the smaller islands are blank because I haven't been arsed with them yet) when I figured the handwave of "if I'm selectively making some land elevated by 2500+ metres, I can do whatever I want with its topography" was good enough. Every colour corresponds to about 100 metres, except the darkest green being anything under 50 metres, starting from dark green and going up to white and then to red and darker to purple as the highest if it's not obvious.
I didn't include rivers, but there are a bunch of them; the huge gorge is important, unless it's too unrealistic and I should scrap it... I see what could be a gorge IRL as well, just going south instead of north and much less extreme (and maybe potentially with enough weathering, another one going in the same direction as the anything-goes gorge), and I'll use any handwave I can to justify having it.
Now, obviously the left one is more realistic in terms of terrain while the right one is literally just "HUGE MOUNTAINS LOL" (aside from a few coincidental similarities to the IRL topography), and I might end up going with some kind of compromise between the two in any case (even though I've grown attached to the right one tbh lol), but like... is there any realistic justification for it? Like, was my original handwave reasonable in the sense that the geology of the region would be so different that it doesn't matter how much is changed? My only concern with that is the coastlines matching an arbitrary IRL hypothetical sea level change, since it makes it taking a sea level in a way that's "realistic" and then going "anything goes" with the details above the surface. I'll admit part of the reason I'd prefer not to just go with the IRL topography is that I spent at least a week drawing the anything-goes topography pretty much pixel by pixel, then spent like 15 minutes on the IRL topography... because I thought "I'll obviously prefer what I came up with", and I do, but there are some things about the IRL topography that I prefer. Also, I just really like the idea of a ridiculous mountain range in the middle of the island.
I mean, I know a mountain massif that goes up to 5200 metres on an island around the same size as Taiwan is kinda ridiculous, but would volcanism be possible to handwave that? The two main "bulges" being extinct-ish volcanoes (in the sense that the main mountains aren't gonna just explode and destroy the world or whatever, but that there's still volcanism all along the slopes and whatnot) that kinda just went ham long enough ago and for a long enough time that it resulted in this kind of formation? The southern one has a small crater in it near the peak because of a recent eruption (in the 7th century), but that's meant to be like VEI4; if I'd have to go with the IRL topography, then it'd just be one of the many smaller mountains that erupted.
I'm 99.999999999% certainly doing "anything goes" for the rest of the archipelago because I've spent way too many months on what's IRL Broken Ridge and Ninety East Ridge to just scrap all of it, but this one island (and the smaller islands around it) is the most important and I don't know if the whole "HUGE MOUNTAINS LOL" stands out as
too unrealistic? IRL it's the Amsterdam-Saint Paul Plateau, which is volcanic, so... unless I'm even stupider than I think I am, wouldn't that mean it'd just require a whole lot more volcanism? I mean, even on top of the already required whole lot more volcanism to get the whole thing's elevation raised by 2500 metres.
Since I'm already asking about this, I might as well ask if it's realistic that the northeast would have a tropical climate with rainforests and stuff, the south and western coast would have an oceanic or temperate climate and the western highlands would have some kinda semi-desert climate? The rest of the world is the same as IRL except for some minor differences in a few things just because (at least for now), so the climate is supposed to be exactly the same as IRL. I don't really understand how the climate works so I don't know what the climate would actually be like, but my logic is that southern Australia is ridiculously hot and it's about the same latitude; New Zealand apparently has some tropical parts too but is mostly oceanic and Amsterdam Island is oceanic, and I'm pretty sure the mountains would cause a rainshadow, so I don't think it'd be unrealistic?
This is getting pretty long so I'm not gonna ask about any conculture stuff, although I'd have some questions about that too... but well, those I can at least handwave as all this extra land even just existing changing things somewhat, even if it didn't really have much effect elsewhere, which might be unrealistic, but whatever.
![[<3]](./images/smilies/heartic.png "<3"){kind=small}
Papuan languages, Morphophonology, Lexical Semantics 
![[:)]](./images/smilies/icon_smile2.png ":)"){kind=icon}
