Naked Science Forum
General Science => General Science => Topic started by: fuddy on 02/04/2007 14:36:35
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Hi - I know this is an incredibly complex science, so I guess I'll use Earth as a benchmark for my question.
So it's our planet, only w/ these changes:
1 -Only one small continent, occupying the northern polar region (say about the size of Antarctica)
2 -An extremely narrow, continuous peninsula arcing south from this continent to about where Bermuda is.
Specifically - (a) what would be the generally predominant climate at the southern end of the long peninsula?
(b) ...at the small polar continent?
Would (a) be warm & arid, & (b) cold & rainy? Would the occasional cyclonic storm swirl across the tropics? Thats what I've mostly gotten so far but some opinions are wildly different & after trying to research the science on this I'm ready to run into the street & shriek something not nice. -HELP!
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I am no expert on this, and I think even with a supercomputer it would still be a very difficult problem. I wouldn't know how hot it was going to be globally but I can make some comments.
The south pole is very cold because it is entirely surrounded by ocean, so currents are not forced to go North south like they are in the Northern hemisphere. I am not sure if your one penisula down to 40-50 degrees north would have this effect. My guess is that the continent would be warmer than antarctica.
You generally get warm currents going north on the west side of continents and cold currents coming south on the east side due to the corriolis force, and if your pennisula was narrow this means it would be mostly at the junction of warm and cold air coming from the two currents, so quite possibly very very wet.
I think these two currents would affect the climate of the polar continent quite strongly as well, probably to the west of the peninsula the climate would tend towards Alaska or Norway on the coast, and to the east something more like greenland. In the centre I would have thought very cold.
I don't know if the other pole would even be frozen during the winter, I guess it would as the coreolis force means that warm currents would tend to swirl rather than going straight there, so they may have time to cool down.
All this is assuming global conditions are broadly similar the earth, and nothing strange has happened.
Do you want this for a sci-fi story or something?
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Thanks, Dave - yes, it's for a story. What I'd LIKE, is for the polar continent to be cold & rainy, & the southern half of the peninsula hot & dry - maybe if there were a few fairly significant gaps in the peninsula to disrupt the currents I'd get closer to that. Maybe a similar peninsula on the opposite side of the globe would help this along, warming the northern pole further & creating a climate on the peninsula similar to Baja California.?. [???]
Any suggestion as to where to get more input on this? And thanks again for your reply!
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Maybe if you could get the peninsula south far enough that it is into the region of deserts... about 30°N or S where the air is mostly descending from higher up.
You could probably get the west half of bits of the peninsula to be a desert in a way ananlagous to chile or mexico, if you had a very high mountain range down the middle like the Andies so the water all fell out on the way up the mountains.
I guess if you changes some of the parameters you could hypothesise a world with more or fewer main convection cells (the earth has 2 in each hemisphere) which could alter where the natural deserts are, and I don't know what heating up or cooling the world would do.
I don't know who would be good to talk to on the subject I am afraid.
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I know, even the slightest variables have potential to change
the entire scenario, and the results supercomputers come to are only as good as the limited info we give them to work with. Thanks again for your help.-(the fuddy)