lethalbutterfly:
thatyellowfinch:
dragonpyre:
thatyellowfinch:
dragonpyre:
olyia-stories:
hacvek:
reminder to worldbuilders: don’t get caught up in things that aren’t important to the story you’re writing, like plot and characters! instead, try to focus on what readers actually care about: detailed plate tectonics
@dragonpyre any chance you could elaborate on this
I grew up learning about land formations. Seeing fictional maps that don’t follow the logic and science of them makes me upset
What are the most common sins you’ve seen relating to this? I wanna know
Mordor.
Why is the mountain range square. How did the mountain range form. Why is there one singular volcano in the center. Why does it act like a composite volcano but have magma that acts like it’s from a shield. If it’s hotspot based volcanic activity why is there only one volcano.
And then the misty mountains!!!! Why isn’t there a rain shadow!! And why is there a FOREST where the rain shadow should be!!!!!!!!
So what is a rain shadow?
Wind blows clouds in from the sea, but mountains are so tall the clouds can’t get past ‘em, so you get deserts on the windward side of mountain ranges because clouds can’t get there to water the land, or do so only very rarely.
this is because, as clouds are forced upwards by rising land, they cool and dump their rain. so the side of the mountain facing the ocean (or an inland sea, or a great lake) gets all the rain as the clouds are squeezed out, and the opposite side gets nothing.
my favorite thing is the american great lake snowbelts! so, the ‘flow’ of weather across north america, in very general terms, blows from the northwest on down south and east to the gulf of mexico.
so the wind is blowing from west to east, and in the winter it’s a dryer wind than in the summer because it’s colder. but after blowing across a great lake for a hundred miles, the wind is wet again. and that wet turns into snow. so for all of these lakes, the big cities are on the west side, not the east sides, because the east sides absolutely suck to live on.
the sole exception is buffalo, NY, which literally has to be there because, unfortunately, that’s where all the important canal stuff between lake ontario and lake erie is happening.
also this always strikes me as cool, check out where cleveland is:
it’s right at the edge of that snowbelt. and you see way more cities west of it than east, too.
On a Watsonian level, sure.
On a Doylistic level, Mordor looks like that because plate tectonics was a fringe, ludicrous, laughable theory that nobody outside serious geology nerds had ever heard of until scientists proved seafloor spreading in the early 1960s. The first edition of the LotR trilogy was published in 54-55. We literally did not know that plate tectonics was real until almost a decade after the book was published, so obviously, it was not something Tolkien could have been considering as he made his maps.
I don’t know enough meteorological history to know when white people figured out about rain shadows and added it to geology classes, or what would have been taught about volcanoes and such. But any education Tolkien got on the subject would have been in childhood/adolescence; his college education focused on the liberal arts, not the sciences, and his professional study was linguistics and the middle ages. So anything Medieval and earlier European authors wrote about he had a pretty good chance of knowing about. But not much exposure to modern science. So his science knowledge was probably limited to “what English schools taught at the turn of the 20th Century.”
