10-12-2019, 06:22 PM
SOUTHERN CONTINENT: GEOGRAPHICAL OVERVIEW
I can’t find my copy of the region’s old topological map, but if I remember correctly then quite a bit of this land-mass’s interior is supposed to consist of uplands or even outright mountain ranges: Not just the sections that are shown on the main map as lacking major rivers, due to the lack of plains in which these could collect enough of the waters together in one route to form, but also some of the areas in which those major rivers that do forms and run down to the coast have their headwaters. This would lower the average temperature of those areas, of course, and affect the passage of rain-bearing winds.
The set of ‘Basic Presumptions’ from which I am working would place this continent basically in the tropics, with the equator running through it [basically] a few grid-lines up from the southern coasts. There would be an equatorial current hitting its eastern end, which would [on average] be the hottest & wettest part of the continent, with that current then splitting to flow both north towards the peninsula that separates the ocean from the Iapetus Sea and south to then continue westwards along the continent’s southern side. Another warm current, but one bearing less rain, would flow eastwards through the Agrimai Ocean into the Iapetus Sea.
This combination of factors would “normally” (i.e. unless the players of any nations located there really want their nations to be different…) give us a basic ecological pattern of: tropical rainforest at the continent’s eastern end, except perhaps in the north-eastern peninsula where climate conditions would be a bit more moderate, and to a lesser extent at the western end, with strips of forest [of various kinds] along the other coasts shading through wooded savannah into grassland as one heads inland and uphill.
I can’t find my copy of the region’s old topological map, but if I remember correctly then quite a bit of this land-mass’s interior is supposed to consist of uplands or even outright mountain ranges: Not just the sections that are shown on the main map as lacking major rivers, due to the lack of plains in which these could collect enough of the waters together in one route to form, but also some of the areas in which those major rivers that do forms and run down to the coast have their headwaters. This would lower the average temperature of those areas, of course, and affect the passage of rain-bearing winds.
The set of ‘Basic Presumptions’ from which I am working would place this continent basically in the tropics, with the equator running through it [basically] a few grid-lines up from the southern coasts. There would be an equatorial current hitting its eastern end, which would [on average] be the hottest & wettest part of the continent, with that current then splitting to flow both north towards the peninsula that separates the ocean from the Iapetus Sea and south to then continue westwards along the continent’s southern side. Another warm current, but one bearing less rain, would flow eastwards through the Agrimai Ocean into the Iapetus Sea.
This combination of factors would “normally” (i.e. unless the players of any nations located there really want their nations to be different…) give us a basic ecological pattern of: tropical rainforest at the continent’s eastern end, except perhaps in the north-eastern peninsula where climate conditions would be a bit more moderate, and to a lesser extent at the western end, with strips of forest [of various kinds] along the other coasts shading through wooded savannah into grassland as one heads inland and uphill.