Athas' sun is a red giant, and if our sun were to be so and the Earth weren't vaporized, the effects would be like: 60 times more radiation, increasing the temperature to about twice that of boiling water; the oceans would evaporate, and the moisture in the atmosphere would vanish because of the extreme heat.
If we were to pursue a "real-world" explanation for Athas, we'd have to assume that it is further away from it's sun (or Athas' sun is very cool, relatively speaking) so as to not recieve the full effects, i.e., not all the moisture is gone, the radiation is probably considerably lower and the temperature is a lot cooler.
Other thoughts?
Second, if you base your idea of a giant star on the Brom paintings, then know that it is but an artistic trick. It is an effort on the part of Brom to emulate photos of real-world skies. For example, you can find in National Geographic magazines photos of trees and people, with as a background Luna the size of a building. You know as well as I that the moon can be blothed out of the sky by extending your thumb out and over it, so its relative size is less than a penny. The photos I mentionned above with the giant moon are landscape zooms, and so can we safely assume are the Brom paintings.
Here is a photo taken with little or no zoom: normal moon
Here is a photo with a huge zoom: giant moon
Third, Athas is a D&D universe, brought to us from the same people who linked every world into a Spelljammer universe a few years back: flat worlds, cube worlds, clockwork spheres, crystal barriers, ...
If we start asking how Athas is possible we run into a multitude of problems: where does all that silt comes from (silt is of mineral nature), how come the atmosphere still has humidity in it even though the world no longer has global oceans or rain clouds, how can changing the sun to a yellow color make the oceans evaporate and never precipitate again, how can Athas have a 20,000+ years history from its moment of creation to now if the world is naturally occuring instead of being designed by gods, etc...
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Oh well.
er...
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Oh well.
:heehee
He humored me.
I'm probably gonna "humor" a lot of people by saying this, but I don't get it Jon.
I'm probably gonna "humor" a lot of people by saying this, but I don't get it Jon.
Damn Frenchies!
/me runs
PB ;)
You didn't humor him.
That's okay, I'm used to it. :D
Well, going with a real-world explanation, Athas' sun would either have to be a red giant or a red dwarf. But, if it were a red dwarf, Athas would have to be much closer to support life, but it would also be tidally locked to the star (ie, no rotation, no day/night cycles, no seasons, and the atmosphere of the dark side (cue Darth Vader breathing) would be frozen, so storing your popsicles would not be a problem). Supposedly four out of every five stars are red dwarves (will check this again), making them the most common stars in the universe.
Actually I was bored when I got to wondering if there could be a real-world explanation for Athas, and now it's gotten out of control (at my end, not here). Maybe I should remember to take my medicine...:D
See ya,
Rand
But then didn't the Sea of Silt on Athas fill up with some kind of out-of-control plankton or algae, which is where all the silt comes from? Showing my Athas ignorance. I can't remember what the explanation was, or if there really was one.
But then didn't the Sea of Silt on Athas fill up with some kind of out-of-control plankton or algae, which is where all the silt comes from? Showing my Athas ignorance. I can't remember what the explanation was, or if there really was one.
The origin of the silt was never explicitly named. But with regards to the Brown Tide, I believe it was named. Well, Windriders of the Jagged Cliffs does state that there was "an inadvertant creation and release of a life-leaching brown plant causing the waters to recede."
I always had a problem with this. If you read the Prism Pentad (when I was on the Athas.org team I was tasked with scouring it to find important factoids for planar notes), I came across the strange similarity between two descriptions. First, the description of the Brown Tide. Later, in the Prism Pentad, there is a scene with Sadira atop the Pristine Tower and she begins casting a spell and immediately a pool of water left over from the proto-ocean begins to turn to a brown puddle as Sadira draws energy. In an interview I did with Troy Denning I asked him this similarity and whether there was supposed to be connection. Troy confirmed that Sadira's drawing life energy causing the pool of original ocean to turn brown WAS supposed to linked to the description of the Brown Tide.
From this, it seemed to me, that whatever the halflings did to activate the Brown Tide, it wasn't related to releasing some algae, but rather was supposed to be related to the halflings drawing life energy to fuel the Pristine Tower. That the halflings didn't figure out it was the Pristine Tower that was causing the change until it was too late, when they did, they decided to preserve some of the life-giving proto-ocean atop the Pristine Tower before it disappeared forever.
Sadira, of course, screwed that all up in her ignorance.
Note, I believe there was a distinction between plain old water, like what is found in the Last Sea and other lakes, and the unique mixture that composed Athas' proto-ocean.
So why does WotJC have this claim about the Brown Tide? IMO, Just another of the many problems that crept in once the original creators were cast aside and new freelancers were brought in and not given the creator's notes or access to the creators.
Regards,
Eric Anondson
What about an explanation for the Sea of Silt?
Magic!
Later, in the Prism Pentad, there is a scene with Sadira atop the Pristine Tower and she begins casting a spell and immediately a pool of water left over from the proto-ocean begins to turn to a brown puddle as Sadira draws energy.
Eric, I'd have to reread the part but i always thought the pool contained at the bottom the stuff the rhulisti used as a building material: a kind of living coral. Seeing the pool as an actual modern swimming pool, you can easily imagine the water would "turn brown" when the bottom and walls of the pool turned brown themselves from dying.
Just like people say when a swimming pool has black walls that "the waters are black".
What about an explanation for the Sea of Silt? Because in the real world, if the seas (oceans) dried up, wouldn't they just be big basins with nothing much in them? Nothing much relative to all the empty space I mean.
There is an explanation for silt: it's the result of a 'mechanical' weathering process on rocks such as by a glacier, water, or sandblasting by the wind, which we know is prevelant on Athas. True silt is tiny, ranging from 0.004 to 0.063 mm in size, and is fine enough to be carried long distances by the wind. Silt is also known as rock flour or stone dust.
This passage in the original DS boxed set in The Wanderer's Journal said on pg. 39;
"In the center of the inhabited lands of Athas sits a huge, sunken basin called the Sea of Silt. This region is filled with tiny particles of dust and silt that the wind has carried into this vast depression over thousands of years."
And thick deposits of silt are known as loess (German), or limon (French). So there's your 'real-world' explanation for the Sea of Silt. :D
There is an explanation for silt: it's the result of a 'mechanical' weathering process on rocks such as by a glacier, water, or sandblasting by the wind, which we know is prevelant on Athas. True silt is tiny, ranging from 0.004 to 0.063 mm in size, and is fine enough to be carried long distances by the wind. Silt is also known as rock flour or stone dust.
This passage in the original DS boxed set in The Wanderer's Journal said on pg. 39;
"In the center of the inhabited lands of Athas sits a huge, sunken basin called the Sea of Silt. This region is filled with tiny particles of dust and silt that the wind has carried into this vast depression over thousands of years."
And thick deposits of silt are known as loess (German), or limon (French). So there's your 'real-world' explanation for the Sea of Silt. :D
There's someting about that explanation that dosen't quite do it for me. If the silt is fine enough to be blown there by the wind, then why does it gather there, and not everywhere on athas. Or mabe it is, but in that case, all of the water would be brown and grimy with silt, woulden't it?
And thick deposits of silt are known as loess (German), or limon (French). So there's your 'real-world' explanation for the Sea of Silt. :D
Loess is also the same word in English. Unfortunately, loess is pretty dang far from how Athasian silt basins behave. Loess are also deposits of wind blown particles from glacial ice sheets. Pretty hard to believe ice sheets were involved in the creation of the Sea of Silt. ;)
Regards,
Eric Anondson
Loess is also the same word in English. Unfortunately, loess is pretty dang far from how Athasian silt basins behave. Loess are also deposits of wind blown particles from glacial ice sheets. Pretty hard to believe ice sheets were involved in the creation of the Sea of Silt. ;)
I agree; I was just repeating information from encyclopedias and the DS boxed set. The Sea of Silt defies rational explanation, except that magic was involved.
There, I said it. Now maybe I can lose this unhealthy obsession with trying to explain Athas via real-world means *Bites lip*. :D
OOPS!!! My bad. I started typing and got distracted from what the thread was actually about, real-science explanations for how a planet like Athas could exist. I'm going with the red supergiant sun, and when the sun got changed each time the Pristine Tower moved the planet further away each time, and that, coupled with atmospheric changes such as an enhanced ozone layer, is how life managed to continue on Athas.
During the Blue Age, we have a warm oceanic planet that (according the Wizard book for the setting) had a Blue (or was it Green?) Sun. The color of that sun would definitely have to do with gases in the atmosphere that caused such a tinting. When the proto-halflings tried to harness the life energy of the world and their sun for the machines and technology they tapped into the innate magic of the world (so they actually were the first wizards in my mind) and created the Brown Tide. They also I imagine burned out that gas in their atmosphere that caused the unusual color of the sun.
Without that gas, the sun shown as a Yellow Sun. The Green Age began, then psionics flourished, then sorcery was found by Rajat and such. With the defiling magic and other horrors unleashed in the war, the Brown Tide swept over more and more of the land, destroying oceans and rivers and thus, destroying plant life and turning the soil barren and rocky. The escaping gases from the dying plants is what tinted the sky the light olive tone and more than likely stripped out some of the shielding elements against heat. The sun became Red due to the change in the atmosphere again, kind of like a dry greenhouse effect. It's also possible that with certain other elements involved (such as Sadira and her solar powered magic) that it could have caused some kind of change with the nuclear reactions within the star, but that's just idle musing on my part.
The Sea of Silt is kind of the only thing I can't figure out, because if the oceans dried up it would just be salt flats and dunes. I can imagine the basins would fill from the wind and eroson as Ablamar stated, so as far as I'm concerned that's as good of an explaination as any.
Well, that's my 2 cents on the subject. Thoughts and/or comments?
-X
The Sea of Silt is kind of the only thing I can't figure out, because if the oceans dried up it would just be salt flats and dunes. I can imagine the basins would fill from the wind and eroson as Ablamar stated, so as far as I'm concerned that's as good of an explaination as any.
If you go deep in Earth's oceans, and I mean *really* deep, you come to an area called the alluvial plain. This is an area of the sea floor made up of a meters-deep layer of (wait for it) SILT! I once heard of a deep-sea research vessel that stirred up the sea floor, and came back three weeks later. The silt *still* hadn't settled! Of course, this is only in the deepest parts of the ocean, out past the continental shelf.
What does this have to do with Athas? During the Blue Age, as far as I can tell, the only part of the Tablelands above water was Forest Ridge. Applying some real world logic (hiss!), you can see how the rest of the Tablelands was the continental shelf, and the Silt Sea was the deep ocean floor. So, when history happened (as it is wont to do), the ocean dried up, leaving an immense basin of silt. Part of the world's description even seems to support this theory. I distinctly remember that part of the Silt Sea's description saying that when winds disturbed the surface, it took days for them to settle down. Sound familiar?
Of course, I could be pulling all of this out of my butt. It's happened before. I've only been obsessed with Dark Sun since the Dragon/Dungeon update to 3.5 :D I've missed a lot. And as far as Athas' sun is concerned, I have no idea how it works. But the theory that atmospheric changes caused the shift in the sun's perceived color does sound the most 'solid'.
I think the sun started off as a blue supergiant
Um, blue giants don't look blue. Red giants don't look red either.
Some of what we see isn't the natural color of the object at all, but our own eyes interpreting and filtering out colors. Otherwise, the sky would be purple and the sun would be more orange and plants would be . . . well, they'd still be green at least. At least we see a few things they way they are.
And going from one lifestage to another for a sun in a second would have so many catastrophic effects to the planet that orbits it that its not even worth consideration that the sun was anything other than a normal star.