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[TurnpikeLad]

A few weeks ago I was in France and I went down in the Gouffre de Padirac, where there's an underground river and an extensive cavern system.  The caves were amazing, with huge caverns, gigantic stalactites and beautiful tiny structures.  But the river was pretty consistently straight, flat and shallow.  In the kilometer that we travelled along it, it stayed pretty consistently about 15 feet wide and about 4 feet deep, and there was almost no current as well.  So, generally what we have in the Dwarf mode right now.

Except for that the ceiling of the river's channel was really high, now that I think about it.  Although the walls were 10-20 feet apart, the ceiling was around 40 to 60 feet up.  The river had eaten straight down into the rock over millions of years.  I don't know if most cave rivers are like this, but I'd say what I saw would work out to between 6 to 8 stories of chasm above the river.

[Felix the Cat]

Yeah, that description fits the cave rivers I've seen in caverns here in the US.

[Minuteman]

As a Geology Major, I support this endeavor.

Toady: if you're worried about water availability, can't we just dig a channel from the outside river inside? You'd have to dig out your farm area on a similar horizontal plane to the outside river, which would be lower than that of your fortress entrance and thus a pain. But that'd be the cost of not finding the cave river.

(I also envision sieging armies cutting off your water supply from outside, but I don't know your plans for that sort of stuff!)

[ September 15, 2007: Message edited by: Minuteman ]

[axus]

That would make it a lot easier to find, if there's a mini-chasm above the river!  I'd still be up for geologist idea though.

[Toady One]

You don't necessarily have an outside river now.  In fact, you likely don't, and can't in a mountain (unless I add the streams).

[Minuteman]

Oh, yes, I see! How about adapting wells? I mean, right now we assume that dwarves are tapping the water table when they dig a well, but you could also dot the mountain with aquifers and make them easy to detect. In temperate regions, copses of trees could act as clues to their x, y location. The resourceful overseer might manage two or three seasons of irrigation from an aquifer before it's drained, during which time he can mount the search for a cave river if there is one.

[Tamren]

Speaking of rivers and such.

There are a lot of mountains in the world with teardrop shaped magma passages fully formed inside them. Most have long since dried up and you can walk through them.

Would these be included in DF in some form? In essense they would be mostly empty sub-magma rivers.

[TurnpikeLad]

I also like the idea of streams and such.  In temperate mountains, it's hard to find a valley or hillside without a brook or a couple little streams trickling down.  Even away from the major rivers, the whole countryside is usually riddled with flowing water.  This isn't so true on flat ground or in the desert, but even in those places there's often a water table if you dig far enough down.  Even mountains in the middle of deserts often have little rivulets that get sucked up and dried out when they reach the desert floor.  A farming culture was able to get by in Arabia for heaven's sake, just by digging long tunnels deep into the mountains and letting the deep water trickle out into their fields.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qanat

I know that this isn't on the plate for this release or the next, but eventually I hope that like in the real world, you can find water anywhere if you try hard enough.  Even if there's not a cave river.

[Minuteman]

I haven't read all the bloats, so can anyone who has tell me: is the water cycle on the list? We could have streams and the like that way.

[Zaratustra]

Well, how do people find water in real life?

[Deto]

quote:Originally posted by Zaratustra:
<STRONG>Well, how do people find water in real life?</STRONG>

They wait for rain?  

[mickel]

Actually, in most places, you just dig straight down, and there it is. I noticed references to a water table in the dev notes, so I'm guessing the dorfs will do it the same way the rest of us do.