Questions tagged [geology]
For questions about rocks, minerals and the physical structure and substance of the world.
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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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What geographical changes does Canada need to have a far larger carrying capacity?
Despite being larger than the USA, Canada has substantially fewer people. As a matter of fact, California has more people than Canada does. This is because Canada has much less arable land than the ...
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what would make mountains move as waves on liquid
I like the idea of mountains that move like water waves, with a period of centuries. Can you rationalize that sans magic?
I envision a thin rubbly crust on a viscous liquid mantle, but intuition ...
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How could an Underground city be ventilated? [duplicate]
Normally, human activity produces heat and therefore, an underground city would have to ventilate and facilitate air flow.
What are some ways in which this could be possible?
Details about the setting:...
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How large can a network of underground tunnels be before it collapses on itself?
How large can a network of underground tunnels be before it collapses on itself?
In my world I have an alien planet where most intelligent life lives underground in a global network of tunnels. These ...
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Getting a planet to be as volcanic as Io
Just to clarify, I am not looking for a magma ocean planet (I already have one in my system interior to this planet’s orbit, at 0.0197 AU from the star, which has a supercritical atmosphere and a ...
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Can flood basalt eruptions start in historical timescales?
So I ended up reading about flood basalt eruptions, which apparently have a relatively rapid onset, geologically speaking. This reminded me of Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy's world. However, I ...
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Coral Islands and Atolls on a Drip-and-Plume world
I have a world which has a drip-and-plume tectonics, meaning that there are no plate divisions. Instead, plumes of magma rise to the surface to create more scattered volcanism, coronae and gradually ...
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Can a train/elevator be feasible for scaling huge mountains (modern technology)?
In my world, there are magical walls on mountains summits similar to Skyrim. Once a person reaches a magic wall, they mystically have the words imbued in their minds. With enough meditation, they can ...
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Turning Antarctica green with volcanism
As the title suggests, i am wondering if it is possible to turn Antarctica green with volcanism, minimizing the effects on other parts of the planet.
What I have in mind is an extensive volcanic ...
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How will plates form from this ecumenopolitan planet?
In this scenario, there is an artificial planet with a perfectly solid, Mars-like crust, meaning no plate tectonics. This is an ecumenopolis, or planetwide city, similar to Coruscant of the Old ...
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Can gigantic boulders resemble mountains given a long enough time?
As a human mage, Mountain Slinger is infamous for one spell: creating boulders thousands of meters big, putting it in a gigantic sling-like mana structure, and hurling it at her target after building ...
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Finding possible geological incongruities
For reasons, a cosmic corrective force known as the Equilibrium Hivemind awakens on modern day Earth. Viewing the current Korean Peninsula as the anomaly activating it, it forcefully transforms the ...
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Is it possible to create a rocky moon with high volcanic activity but that has underground water?
I am creating a moon for my gas giant, I am going to give the data and a little more context but first I need to make it clear to everyone that there is no life on this moon and I do not plan that, ...
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True living fossils?
Could there be a living creature that is so old that part of it has fossilized? Here are some criteria I have for the thing to be described as a fossil:
It has to be over 10,000 years old.
A portion ...
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Surface Hot-springs on an Icy moon
Would it be possible that on an ice moon like Europa, except more massive, that large volcanoes/thermal vents would be able to reach the surface and create hot springs for life to survive around on ...
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What are some plausible, long-lived geophysical planetary processes which would consistently maintain reddish skies in a human-breathable atmosphere?
Note for clarity: By reddish skies I mean being reddish in the same way Earth's skies are blue. This should apply to the skies in general (not a localized effect), and it's preferable that it's an ...
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Could a planet have metalloids but very few metals?
Could advanced technology be created by an intelligent species on a planet where there are very few true metals and only large amounts of metalloids? I envision a planet sparse in accessible metals, ...
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How to build a defensive wall that Stone Mages can't easily deconstruct?
Assume that the time period takes place at some point before cannons and other later siege equipment (medeival, antiquity, bronze age, etc.)
Stone mages can affect materials that follow the geological ...
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How long would it take for an area to be repopulated after experiencing a meteoric impact?
By repopulation, I refer to the time it will take until the geographic conditions in and around the impact structure are tame enough for civilization (this can be small nomadic camps, and need not be ...
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Crustal composition of an ammonia planet
I am currently building a planet that weighs about 4 earth masses and is 2.3 earth radii long. It is an ammonia planet (as the title suggests), and has ammonia oceans with some dissolved water ice, ...
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Could a planet composed of 70% heavy metals by mass have a plate tectonics?
It would have to be much hotter to sustain any kind of magnetosphere yes, but assuming that it could, with the remaining 30% to play around with for other kinds of elements, and the 70% heavy metal ...
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Could a planet with an unusually high heavy metal content sustain life? [closed]
I'm playing around with the concept of a planet containing unusually high heavy metal content, due to being born in a nebula that resulted from a neutron star merger. What conditions would this planet ...
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Making nuclear weapons almost impossible to build
The Issue
I am currently working on a world that is supposed to take place around the 1980s, in terms of parity with Earth, technology-wise. There is a lot of magic mixed into it as well.
The real ...
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geology in fantasy worlds
I was wondering about how to figure out the geology of your fantasy world. For example, where would granite, limestone, sandstone, and gems (diamonds, amethyst, etc.) be placed? If a castle is made ...
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Could mountains form on anhydrous planets?
The primary mechanism for mountain formation (of which I'm aware) is uplift of the crust, with rivers eroding their way through softer sediments as the crust rises to form peaks and canyons. That ...
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How quickly can a continent split and separate without an Extinction Level Event occuring
Consider an Earth-like planet. I want a large (Europe/Africa) continent to split in half, with the halves separating in a reasonably short time (by geological standards). The halves need to separate ...
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How would the "Hardness vs Toughness" dynamic of gems apply if it were possible to make shields out of them?
From my understanding, "hardness" and "toughness" in the context of material sciences (or perhaps specifically gems?) refers to two separate properties: "hard" materials ...
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Does planet size affect mountain formation?
I just wanted to know if the size of a planet would affect the size of its mountains. For example, I know Mars has larger mountains than our own despite being 1/3 our size. Do planets that are larger ...
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What is the strongest earthquake possible without wiping out all life?
In the story in question, an extremely powerful earthquake decimates the Earth (but does not destroy it) due to Unforeseen Consequences of Our Actions. Ideally some humans need to survive, so ...
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Superhabitable Earth Analog
Consider an earth analog but with different land mass distribution and shallow seas.
If the seas are at just epipelagic depth, what would change energy-transport-wise? If the land mass can have ...
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How would benthic marine organisms like shellfish and crabs adapt to a hypersaline environment? [closed]
In this world of mine, through a mysterious phenomenon called magick(tm) a God made it so all the salt in the world is either in a few location, alpine salt lakes or at the very bottom of the ocean. ...
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Rate at which jackhammer excavates asteroid
I've got a family using a jackhammer to excavate an asteroid habitat they intend to homestead in.
The jackhammer is large, and would normally need mounting on
a column or tripod like this mining ...
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What's the maximum mass for an Iron Planet to have a magnetosphere like Mercury's?
I'm designing an iron planet which migrated into its habitable zone. Basic research told me iron planets cool off too quickly to have a magnetic field, so initially I was looking for ways native life ...
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Reality Check: Meteor Shower buried supermetal in the earth's crust, that is now being mined out
Centuries ago, a localized meteor shower deposited rare "supermetal" in the side of a mountain range. Due to the force of the impact, it created a pockmarked area with the metal at varied ...
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How might the surface of a tectonically active planet appear without a global ocean?
I hope this is "specific" enough, and sorry I don't really know formatting rules yet.
I'm trying to build a habitable desert super-Earth, where water can only exist seasonally around the ...
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What would be considered continents in a world of islands?
The title says it all but i'll go into detail for clarity.
On earth the definition of continents and the line between those and just big islands is relatively clear (let's not get into the Europe, ...
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What could lead a large ocean on a planet's surface to recede completely only to reappear later on in a cyclical process?
I don't just mean tides or large-scale floods and droughts but a premise where one or more large bodies of water (or even every such body if that makes it easier) disappear, only to reappear one or ...
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An ocean-planet made out of deadly, non-water chemicals
I'm currently working on a comic-series set in a solar-system that isn't ours, and i'm reworking most of my planets.
One of them, a cold ocean-planet below freezing temperatures that orbits its k-...
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Is it possible for an artesian basin to go underneath a shallow sea while still being freswater?
An artesian basin is an aquifer in which water within permeable rock is kept under pressure between 2 layers of impermeable rock.
I don't know if any artesian basin exists like this in real life, but ...
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Continent Formation and Volcanos
For over a year I've been writing about a fictional race of people that has taken on rather a life of its own. They live on an earth like world with similar geological processes to our own but I don't ...
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What would happen to an Earth-like planet if it had a more magnetically permeable inner core?
I was contemplating the impact of doping an Earth-like planet's core with a substance that alters its magnetic permeability. Specifically, I considered a scenario where the planet has an improved ...
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Possibility and sustainability of Volcanic Climate in Tropical Asia
I am looking for an answer relating to the possibility of very tall volcanoes (maybe as tall as 6km high), scattered around Tropical Asia (Indian Subcontinent and Southeast Asia), that spew lots of ...
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Guidance: How to Create Sensible Plate Tectonics
This is a community-wiki question
Worldbuilding Stack Exchange regularly hosts questions asking either how to establish plate tectonics based on an existing planetary map or to judge the suitability ...
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How many different mines and extraction industries would a colony need in order to be able to produce equipment similar to what we have now?
Help me, you benevolent geology nerd!
This is a question I'm trying to find a workable (but not necessarily precise) answer for a colony-building sci-fi RPG game that I am GMing for some of my friends....
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Do the mountains formed by a divergent boundary form on either coast of the resulting channel, or on the part that has not yet separated?
The lakes and the bay are formed by the rift where the right chunk is diverging away from the main plate. I've put mountains on the land part of the rift a la Ethiopia's Great Rift Valley, but should ...
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What would the geological effects of erosion due to extreme megafauna be like on large timescales?
Whenever I see fictional biospheres with massive or otherwise extreme megafauna capable of significant short-term erosion (such as toppling large rock formations, leveling mountains, digging huge ...
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Where should my tectonic plates be?
This is my map:
It was generated using tectonics.js, and I traced it in GIMP. For a while now, I've been having trouble pinning down just where exactly my tectonic plates should be. I tried sketching ...
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Where, on a geological timescale, would human-worked materials end up?
One day, a race of hyper-advanced aliens are on a stag weekend to Earth, and for a joke they decide to 'tag' every atom of every material that humans have 'worked' through chemical processes (eg ...
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Could You Use Artificial Volcanoes To Create Buildings?
For the purposes of this question the builders are incredibly wealthy, have access to cheap nukes to use for excavation, and everyone in this world is immune to radiation.
The technology is decades ...
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