Sunday, November 04, 2012

Howlina - Day 4 - Cataclysmic Events

Today I need to come up with some cataclysms.

"... jot down some of the Really Big Land Features you want in your story and just think "what if that were made by...." Write down a couple of causes for those features and scars..."

Big things:

  1. Mountains
  2. Snow Caps
  3. Vast Forests
  4. Desert
  5. Fertile Plains
  6. Rivers
  7. High Lakes
  8. Low Lakes
Causes:
  1. Plate uplifting and/or volcano chain that grew very slowly so the peaks are not jagged, but spread out.  This ended a very long time ago.
  2. The mountains are high enough (like Mona Loa) to have snow caps even if the land is in the tropics.
  3. Forests are caused by seeds growing into trees, but I'm thinking of several levels/layers of forest, from rain forest to deciduous to coniferous.  I'm thinking this layering is because of a terraced set of mountains dividing the land into different altitudes and different rain patterns
  4. A great fire swept an area of little rain a few thousand years ago and maybe an Earthquake changed the river that fed the previous grasslands
  5.  The same Earthquake that devastated the desert also brought up an area that had been underwater, maybe freshwater, and it became a very fertile grassland  OR somehow all the topsoil slide off one area resulting in a wasteland and doubling the fertility of a neighboring area (or land filling that lake).
  6. The rivers have great floods after the rainy season and the snow melt.  There are mountain rivers and navigable lowland rivers.  The rivers tend to cut the land so there aren't too many spectacular waterfalls.
  7. The terraces tend to accumulate waters and there are high valleys that bottom in beautiful lakes, no claderas
  8. The low, meandering rivers have several oxbow type lakes and there are some hydroelectric reservoirs.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Bill, too much work for us retired people. Too much thinking. Sorry, Love. Auntie Char xoxoxoxo ;-/