Invent a planet! No floating rocks! No blue humans! No one-biome worlds! Just planets that seem truthy.
CHASM:
The moon of a moderate gas giant orbiting it's star some distance outside of the normal habitability zone, Chasm is nonetheless much like earth, sharing a rich variety of life. Due to the distant star, the planet receives only a small amount of solar radiation, and its limited day is often eclipsed by the parent planet. The moon orbits the gas giant at a significant distance, and the planet has it's own strong magnetosphere, freeing it from the worst of the radiation hazards of giants, though the aurora are intense in comparison to earth's.
Chasm is 0.98 earth masses, but due to tidal forces, its significantly oblate shape causes surface gravity to vary more than earth's does. This tidal activity gives the planet a great deal of internal heat, though it is not as active as Io.
Chasm's surface is defined by a great many small tectonic plates containing the highlands and separated by deep trenches. These volcanically heated trenches are the primary energy source for life on Chasm's surface.
The centers of these plates are coated in thick ices, including frozen water, carbon dioxide, and methane. These areas have very little atmosphere and precipitation, as by the time atmospheric currents reach these places, most volatiles have precipitated out. Glacier-like formations lead outward from these places, carrying these elements and gradually eroding the highlands. The formation of new plates occurs as old ones are subsumed in trenches from erosion and plate movement. As the old trenches widen, eventually new plates develop in the gaps. The constant plate movement causes these small plates to merge often, and very large mountain ranges can be formed.
There is almost no complex life in the central continental regions, although extremeophile colonies do exist that live off the small amount of sunlight.
As the glaciers move downhill, they are gradually warmed by inward-moving air currents that in turn cool and precipitate more and more material. This speeds the glaciers as they gain more mass. This is a complex region that is little understood; it is effectively the transition between a region similar to the martian or even lunar poles, and places merely antarctic in temperature. Soon carbon dioxide and methane ice has entirely sublimated from the glaciers, to be replaced with water ice. By this point, a number of still very simple but earthlike microscopic plants exist. These alge get many nutrients from the tailings of the glaciers, which carry some quantity of icy dust and ash that had been carried to the central regions and then deposited, which sometimes carries organic material.
The glaciers begin to become rivers as they leave the antarctic regions. Where earth sees tundra and other subarctic climes at these temperatures, the limited sunlight makes that impossible here. However, some animal life does travel this far; By this point, ash and many volatile chemicals released by the volcanic chasms regularly precipitate, and provide the nutrients and chemical energy for a small biosphere here, mainly built on scavengers and chemosynthetic life.
This life is restricted to the river canyons, however. This is still within the body of the continent, and the mountaintops remain effectively "superarctic". The valleys do concentrate the ashfall, making them extensions of warmth and nutrients into the cold.
This region of semi-tundra is a wide and varied band from deep within the continents to close to the edges. As the trenches are approached, the temperature rapidly increases. There are several narrow bands in succession that contain amoungst them most of the life on Chasm.
Continuing outward, the coldest of these regions is something seemingly similar to a rainforest. At this point, a great deal of water is usually precipitating as very warm and humid air moves away from the chasm and very rapidly starts to cool. This rain is often quite warm by earthly standards, and the air temperature is comfortable to humans, though the chemistry is certainly not. The precipitation is very rich in dissolved chemicals, and the thick plantlike life of the region derives much energy from these compounds. Animals that feed off of this life are also common in this area.
As the clouds are thick with water and ash, this is the darkest region of the planet in terms of normal light. However, bioluminescence is very common here, particularly amoungst "toxic" plants and animals. interestingly, the toxins many of these creatures produce are actually inert to earth life, and can be easily treated to create digestible sugars. Of course, the delivery method of these toxins usually also delivers small quantities of cyanide, fluorine compounds, and heavy metals used in normal respiration of the life here.
All earth life and all Chasm life is mutually toxic without intense purification. A single dead human in a breached suit can poison several square miles of terrain for weeks until the sugars have broken down. Of course, any human in a breached suit would be a dead one. This is why surface suits for teams use artificial bioluminescence that resembles that used by toxic animals, and this has proven to be very effective at preventing animal attacks.
As the rivers flow closer to the trenches, the temperature climbs higher. At first, the plant life grows increasingly dense, but after a point, it starts to grow stunted as the temperature passes the point at which water can no longer condense- in other words, places where rainfall drops off. There are regions where weather patterns cause the temperature to fluctuate over the border, and these are dominated by increasingly lower plant and animal populations. This boarder region is most comparable to savanna conditions, though without seasonal cycles, there are significant differences. By this point, the rivers are extremely large, with many that are comparable in size to the Amazon on earth. The lakes that form from these rivers are also of great size, and feature perhaps the most earthlike life- fish and plants similar to deep-sea life.
These lakes, like earth's seas, are the sinks for a great deal of minerals and elements; in fact, the constant vulcanism and rapid evaporation in these lakes leads to thick crystallization on the lake bottoms and shores. The water is so dense that even with a full load of equipment, boats are almost unnecessary for humans. Water evaporating from here and from the rest of the region as it seeps in underground is immediately carried back uphill over the rainforests, leading to a relatively short water cycle, with the vast majority of it cycling between these points.
Collecting the slurry and/or crystal deposits could be a lucrative form of mining, since many dissolved minerals in the water are volatiles that are difficult to extract elsewhere on large scales. However, the slurry is a rich microbial habitat, and seems to be key in regulating Chasm's atmosphere by doing the local equivalent of fixing nitrogen. Crystal extraction could prove to be safe.
After this savanna and lake region, a very narrow border climate exists before the volcanic trenches open. This area has very little life, but receives more, and more constant, light than anywhere else. Reflected off the clouds, the brightly glowing lava provides enough light for very small scale photosynthesis. Where there are nutrients and water, such as by the already boiling rivers, some photosynthetic life exists, coating the rocks in algae similar to that found in earthly hot springs. This area is little explored due to it's hostility, but given the wealth of organic materials in the runoff from upstream, it's quite possible that more complex life exists here in unexplored places. Scattered reports of armored crab-creatures with heat-sink-like growths in their carapaces lend credence to this direction of research.
This region can be extremely narrow; in some cases, sheltered savanna valleys have rivers that pour directly through narrow openings into magma. In other areas, this desert region extends for some distance. Mountaintops in this region are still essentially superarctic, though they sometimes have high valleys that collect some nutrients and warmth, acting as extremely inaccessible islands of life.
After this region, the only remaining biome is the coast and magmatic sea. No life is known to exist here, aside from the potential for panextremeophiles. Despite this, these chasms are essential for life on this planet, as the planet's internal chemical forges are hard at work, and the complex compounds that vaporize from the region bring essential chemical energy to the cooler regions.
These canyons are larger than any exposed lava on earth. Where what remains of rivers pour into the lava, we see plumes of ash and smoke that rise up and start moving uphill. Generally, most of these rivers have already entirely evaporated before they even reach the lava, as the rock in the region is itself nearly molten. There may be some continent-building as the water cools the lava enough to solidify into new land- however, these areas are highly geologically active, shifting throughout the day as the pull of the parent giant distorts the planet. The lava is, in fact, tidal much like earth's seas are. This movement tends to destroy small-scale building.
There are a few small islands in these lava seas that are large enough to dissipate the heat of the surrounding molten rock- though it is important to note here that unlike ice, the rock that makes up continents is denser than surface lava- it is only the presence of heavy metals and great pressure that makes internal magma denser than cool stone. As such, there are absolutely no "rock icebergs"- a chunk that breaks off a continent near the coast would simply sink until it is deep enough to be buoyant, then gradually melt. Instead, these small islands are connected under the lava surface to the mainlands. They are to be considered unstable unless carefully examined by ultrasound, but can be useful positions for stations.
Finally, note that this is an extremely limited summary of the climates of Chasm, similar in detail to a report describing earth's biomes as being determined entirely by altitude and latitude. Each small continent features a unique ecosystem along the general lines described here. Each tectonic plate is largely isolated by nearly insurmountable magma canyons; life spreads from one to another only by flight, or the chance drifting of a spore or seed, or else only when continents collide.
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Topic: Hard Science Planets! (Read 2073 times)