12-13-2020, 01:47 PM | #1 |
Join Date: May 2010
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Can the hydrology of this world be made to work?
I'm working on a bronze-age fantasy setting based largely on ancient Egypt with a dash of Mesopotamia thrown in. I decided I didn't want the world to be too exact an analog for Earth, so I flipped a coin to determine the hemisphere (result: southern hemisphere) and rolled dice to determine the direction of the river flow (result: west to east). But otherwise, I've been using Egypt as my main inspiration for things like the physical environment and supportable population density, with a region resembling the Levant to the south, and some wooded mountains inspired by the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zagros_Mountains added at a point roughly equivalent to the Nile's first cataract.
I'm concerned that this may not work hydrologically, though. If there's nothing but open ocean to the East, the climate should be more like the Yangtze river valley than the Nile river valley. I think I can solve that by having my setting's Big River empty into a relatively narrow sea with another large land mass not too far to the east, so I can justify the east coast desert. But I think I still might have a problem with the Big River's basin not getting enough rainfall to produce the Nile-like floods necessary to support the population density. I'm thinking of maybe flipping east and west across the entire setting—or is there a way I can avoid that? The idea of making the setting's physical environment subtly weird in ways that make perfect logical sense once you have all the information is something that appeals to me, assuming I can make it work. |
12-13-2020, 03:56 PM | #2 |
Join Date: Nov 2016
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Re: Can the hydrology of this world be made to work?
Have you checked the peruvian Caral civilization? They were presumably contemporary with the Egyptian Pyramids, and were seated around 3 rivers. It might help you with your setting.
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12-13-2020, 06:02 PM | #3 |
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
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Re: Can the hydrology of this world be made to work?
I’m not very knowledgeable about hydrology, but I can think of two ways to get reliable annual flooding and two ways to get a desert for your river to flow through.
The flooding can depend either on snowmelt or on seasonal rains. The desert can be produced either by the high pressure belt in the horse latitudes or by a rain shadow. Mostly that’s easier with the river running between two latitudinal bands of climate (i.e. north or south), but you might like to look into the way that a seasonal analogue of the katabatic effect results in the Tibetan plateau producing the monsoons of South Asia.
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12-14-2020, 02:00 AM | #4 |
Join Date: Mar 2008
Location: The Kingdom of Insignificance
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Re: Can the hydrology of this world be made to work?
Wot Agemegos said. The early civilisations along the Indus come to mind.
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12-14-2020, 08:47 AM | #5 | |||
Join Date: May 2010
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Re: Can the hydrology of this world be made to work?
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12-14-2020, 09:52 AM | #6 |
Join Date: Sep 2007
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Re: Can the hydrology of this world be made to work?
You could also shift the river north or south, to change its position relative to this planet's analog of Hadley cells. Or if you really want to make it not an analog of Earth, spin the planet the other way around.
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12-14-2020, 10:10 AM | #7 |
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Gothenburg, Sweden
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Re: Can the hydrology of this world be made to work?
Wouldn't it be easier to have the wind be the breath of the river god - one breath in and one breath out per year?
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12-14-2020, 11:04 AM | #8 | |||
Join Date: May 2010
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Re: Can the hydrology of this world be made to work?
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On the whole, maybe I could get on board with this idea if I had a better sense of all the implications for the setting, but I'm not sure what those implications are. Quote:
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An option that hasn't been discussed is to have the not-Nile deflect either significantly north or significantly south once it's gotten ~100 miles beyond the "first cataract" / "Zagros mountains" region. But I'm concerned the results would be very unnatural looking on a bird's eye view of the map. |
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12-16-2020, 01:45 PM | #9 |
Join Date: May 2010
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Re: Can the hydrology of this world be made to work?
Looking more at it, Bangladesh's summer monsoons do seem to blow from the southwest. Translating to the southern hemisphere, maybe having a monsoon from the northwest feeding my river basin would work?
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12-16-2020, 02:53 PM | #10 |
Hero of Democracy
Join Date: Mar 2012
Location: far from the ocean
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Re: Can the hydrology of this world be made to work?
You could use a double set of rain shadows: the winds blow in from the east, hit the first and lower set of mountains, then pass over a dry region before hitting a second set of higher mountains and getting completely wrung out.
As for turning the river north or south, could you tilt the river instead, giving it a slight incline into wetter latitudes? You know, looking at a map... are the Tigris and Euphrates too crooked for you (if you mirrored them over the equator?)
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