Questions tagged [erosion]
For questions about the natural process by which landmasses can change shape.
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Subterranean river drainage
In my worldbuilding project, there is a large lake and associated river basin which I have planned currently to drain through a subterranean river and reemerge downstream. I really like the idea but ...
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Extreme Polar Ice Erosion
I want to better understand the effects of melting ice on a planet with an axial tilt more extreme than our own. I want to say the planet in question has a tilt of fifty degrees, and so either ...
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If winds blew 500 mph regularly for millions of years, would dune ergs get blown into a corner?
Suffice it to say this is a bit specific for google. Erosion likely still builds up huge sandfields but I wonder if, given the force of the wind, they'd be moved from being spread out as an actual erg ...
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How much would be left of this future human civilization after 10 million years? [duplicate]
So Humans went extinct in the future, they are completely gone, but their buildings are not. Now it's 10 million years in the future, and I want to know what could plausibly still be visible on the ...
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The “rock cycle” of an Alderson Disk
In my world, human civilization would live on an Alderson Disk.
An Alderson disk (named after Dan Alderson, its originator) is a hypothetical artificial astronomical megastructure, like Larry Niven's ...
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Extreme winds creating windy canyons
On a planet I've been working on that has extreme wind conditions, coastal zephyrs cross through mountains and get split into stream-like avenues that carve deep gouges in the rainshadowed valley ...
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How fast and how coarse does a sandstorm need to be to sand a human down to nothing in the span of an hour?
I am designing a world with extreme weather, which uses human survivability as a measure of time. I've equated something close to an hour for the time I am using, for simplicity's sake, but this poses ...
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How to Cause a Hydrosphere Apocalypse III: Erosion and a Shallow Sea
This is a bit of an addendum to a previous question, shown here. (How to Cause a Hydrosphere Apocalypse Part II The Great Flood).
I like the rain of ice from a dying moon, answer and I have decided to ...
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How to create an immobile continent?
For my fantasy world, there is an artificially created continent (created by magic, but an important note is that the continent itself is ENTIRELY non-magical.)
The continent is nearly 20,000 years ...
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Why do my humongous cliff ledges have cultivable soil on them?
This world is basically a huge vertical cliff wall, hundreds of kilometers high. Some of the crevices and ledges in that wall are large enough to build cities on (up to kilometers in length and up to ...
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The erosion problem on floating islands
Even the tallest mountains will be ground to dust with time. Given, of course, nothing sustains them (like tectonic activity which prevents mount Everest from eroding away too quickly, even making it ...
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Gaining a Better Understanding on how Sand Powers Work
Awhile ago, I posted a question on this site asking how a group of air-controlling mages could use their powers to create and project lightning/electricity, sorta like an Avatar/LoK sub-bending art ...
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What could cause the formation of canyons and river pattern in a atmosphereless moon?
So I've made this moon with a texture from Google earth,
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Tassili+n'Ajjer/@26.2042919,7.0063722,457055m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x12306aaaaaaaaaa7:0xa1414e994aabc4b6!...
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How Would Organic Material Erode If Petrified
So in my world, the main Antagonist has the ability to drain the life from things around her, turning them to stone in the process. That made me wonder how organic material would erode if it were ...
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What would be the condition of a wood cottage that has been abandoned for ~20 years?
Suppose a two-storey timber cottage has been left unoccupied for 15 to 20 years. The entire structure is wooden, including all beams and supports, with a rammed earth foundation. It's situated within ...
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Lifespan of abandoned buildings
I'm exploring a post-apocalyptic world and want to build a realistic scenario for the condition of abandoned ruins. What would you estimate to be the lifespan of the following building types? And by ...
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How long would a flat Earth last?
As we all know the Earth is flat. Once upon a time a group of explorers set off with the idea of proving that the world was round and that there was a route to the spice islands the other way, but the ...
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Long term effects of erosion
What could be the effects of erosion on a rocky Earth-sized planet on a universal time scale (in the order of $10^{40}$ years)?
Let's assume that:
The source of sunlight is endless and almost ...
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Methods to Stabilize Geology in Large Artificial Space Environments
Everyone loves a Dyson Sphere or a Ring World, so much more room to enjoy than a traditional round planetoid, it's all about space efficiency for the advanced civilizations. There are however a ...
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Erosion of buildings on geological timescales
I'm looking at a science fiction scenario similar to Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness where buildings are exposed to the elements for millions of years. I have a feeling they wouldn't be quite ...
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Major Mountain Ranges...Minus the Ice [closed]
The most major mountain ranges in the world have proven themselves to be distinctive. This distinctiveness is made possible only by a recent history of being sculpted and resculpted by ice.
Rocky ...
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How much can we learn from a grain of sand?
I've wondered about this for years. Reading one of the books in the Inheritance Cycle, I came across a stipulation. It stated that if observed enough, a grain of sand could render to the viewer the ...
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What is the expected terrain for an arid highly eccentric Earth-like planet?
For this question lets take a trip to Slyo Dacas:
Slyo Dacas (sil-yo-dak-iss) is a world roughly the same size of Earth with a decent magnetic field and no moons.
The world is a bit drier than ...
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Creating a realistic world map - Underwater geography
This Query is part of the Worldbuilding Resources Article.
Creating a realistic world map - Erosion covered the various factors that govern the topography of a world. Rivers, wind, heat, and plants ...
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Creating a realistic world map - Erosion
This Query is part of the Worldbuilding Resources Article.
Once geological processes have created a landscape a number of factors come into play in order to reshape it. This includes weather and ...
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