Needed - a modified map of the Earth

[ffutures]

I've looked at the various options for changing the position of the Earth's axis - see previous posts - and decided that I'm going to go with a relatively small change, moving the North Pole about 15 degrees south along the 180 degree meridian, a little west and north of the Bering strait between Alaska and Siberia. This means that London is now at 35 degrees north, not 50 degrees, so hopefully enjoys a mediterranean climate (about the same as Algiers). The North Polar ice cap is probably going to end up close to or touching Siberia and Alaska, but they're used to cold weather there anyway, while the South Pole moves closer to the tip of Africa, and hopefully nothing too drastic happens to the rest of the world. It's still going to be a more or less recognizable map, just a bit distorted.

Niamey in Niger is now on the equator, I think the northern tip of Australia is too, Ecuador is now very slightly south of it, and so forth. You can visualise this to some extent as a sine wave plotted on a normal map of the Earth, with the peaks 15 degrees North of the current equator at the Greenwich Meridian, 15 degrees south at 180 degrees.

The snag is that what I will need is a map of the earth plotted with the new equator as a straight line, and the land masses shifted accordingly. I can probably fake this to some extent by distorting a normal map, but all map projections lie to some extent about the position and size of land masses near the poles, and changing their position without changing the relative sizes will make this worse. I'm not enough of a geographer to get this right. If anyone has software or the skills to do this properly, or can think of a better way to do it, I'd love to hear from you.

I'm not too sure what to do about the degree of axial tilt. 20 degrees or so seems to work well for having seasons and forming nice big ice caps, but would anyone stupid enough to do this in the first place think of that?

Comments

[nelc.livejournal.com]

Ah, that wasn't as hard as I imagined it would be. Can you see this:

(http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v176/Nelsie/Sci-fi/?action=view&current=world_map-15-displaced-50.png)

If not, try this (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v176/Nelsie/Sci-fi/world_map-15-displaced-50.png).

Not print-worthy, but you should be able to use it as a basis for tracing a map of your own. The bold lines are the new equator, 30° and 60° latitude lines. The old lines are still there but warped, so you can see where the temperature won't have changed very much. Looks like North America and East Asia aren't too badly off. Nova Scotia and New York will enjoy a balmier climate, while the West Coast will be getting a little cooler. Texas might become marginally less habitable, as will Alaska, for opposite reasons.

New South Wales may get a bit dryer, while northern Queensland looks to become even more unbearable. Japan will be cooler too, and Hawaii.

Contrary to what I posted last time, it looks like the Sahara and Kalihari will be moving north, reducing the habitability of the north African coast and maybe Spain, Italy and Turkey, but making South Africa a bit more temperate.

Looks like the Ross Ice Shelf will disappear, while the Ronne Shelf will be growing, and Wilkes Land might become slightly habitable.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Fantastic, that's exactly what I want, and I can delete the curved lines easily enough. Given how small it will be on the page I think it will be fine.

Many many thanks!

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I forgot to say, if you could remind me of your name (and don't mind doing so) I'll give you a credit in the acknowledgements.

[nelc.livejournal.com]

Nelson Cunnington, but NelC is fine, too.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Forgot to say that I'll leave the old lines in to show where the parallels used to be.

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

"Contrary to what I posted last time, it looks like the Sahara and Kalihari will be moving north"
Do you mean the geographical areas we now know by those names will move north, or that the *phenomena* (i.e. the actual deserts) will move north?

Parts of the Sahara are due south of Britain (an irony I noted after travelling to the Sahel via Moscow!), so if you move Britain closer to the equator then you move "The Sahara" - as currently labelled on maps - south too (as your diagram shows)... but then the Sahara (the actual desert) will start creeping northwards towards Spain.

I expect there to be an awful lot of very (literally) hot-headed Spaniards and Italians coming over here, to escape the heat and have their touristy revenge upon us. So no change there then. =:o}

[nelc.livejournal.com]

As phenomena. Clearly, nearly every geographic feature at 0° longitude will be moving south, as most of the stuff (what little there is) at 180° will be moving north. But the deserts form at around 30° north and south of the equator, due to the Hadley cells formed by coriolis forces on the spinning Earth's atmosphere. So everything else being equal, the African deserts will be marching north of their present geographical position.

A 15° shift isn't too drastic a move, so I'm thinking that there won't be too much shifting of long range wind and ocean currents, relative to geographical features, though I could be wrong. My feeling is the the circumpolar current around Antartica won't change course, for example, though it might weaken or waver in certain places. I think the Gulf Stream will still be being generated, though it probably won't be pointed at the British Isles any more. But I could be wrong, and Marcus doesn't care anyway. ;)