Needed - a modified map of the Earth
Sep. 3rd, 2011 09:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ffuturesI'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?
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?
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Late, but ...
Date: 2011-09-04 04:10 pm (UTC)Verne's The Conquest of the North Pole has a description of what would happen if it were done with a single blow, which can be summarised as "quite a bit like a big enough asteroid impact to do the job". The earthquakes and tidal waves would be far beyond anything that happens when the planet is left to itself.
Re: Late, but ...
Date: 2011-09-04 06:01 pm (UTC)Re: Late, but ...
Date: 2011-09-06 01:36 am (UTC)Also: Changing the orientation of a (near-)sphere of rock is relatively easy: Just fix a pair of rocket engines to a pair of relatively stationary antipodes (such as the rarely visited, fairly unobserved polar regions, for example), and set them firing in the required (opposing) directions for a sufficient length of time... Or period of time each day...
Changing the planet's axis of *angular momentum*, on the other hand... Sheesh! Where do we find a roughly Earth-sized amount of mass we can chuck in the opposite angular direction... without anyone noticing!?! =8o>