Last time I checked, sea levels in the late Jurassic and early Cretaceous were over 100m higher than today due to higher co2 levels.
Map Thread XIII
- Thread starter Pragmatic Progressive
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Last time I checked, sea levels in the late Jurassic and early Cretaceous were over 100m higher than today due to higher co2 levels.
So I'll bite; what the hell happened to the Great Lakes? They've been demoted to Adequate Lakes!
I think it's just a world map with everything below 70m altitude under water. Chunks of the great lakes are higher than that.
Lake Baikal and Lake Titicaca are completely missing, as they are both above 70m of elevation.
It wasn't just a matter of CO2 levels, the distribution of land and sea were different: continental shelves were generally rather broader, for one thing.
I find it incredibly difficult to believe that the bottom of Lake Baikal is above sea level.
Credit goes to BMN for making the base map for this.
Risk Map with TACOS color scheme and internal divisions. (Oddly, Afghanistan doesn't actually have Afghanistan.)
Risk Map with TACOS color scheme and internal divisions. (Oddly, Afghanistan doesn't actually have Afghanistan.)
I like it. It has much more detail than mine. Especially with those inland seas. i look forward to that topographic one. But what did you use for your reference? I've never seen a variation were Antarctica and Australia drifted like that, and were Baja dint fracture off and crash into Alaska. But otherwise great map. Is it free for use if youre credited?
Also does any one now were i can find some worlda style maps of other planets in the solar system that i could use?
Nice! It's always a banner day when we get a new SRegan map.
Minor nitpick: beaches of New Mexico? I think you're thinking of the Cretaceous period there.
Some more detail on what happened to poor Mexico, if you please.
British diaspora? Come now, the British will just move slowly uphill and grumble about how much more of the island was above water back in the day and why doesn't the bloody government do something.
Bruce
Oh heck, got my Southwesterlies mixed up, even (somehow) after Googling to check. I feex.
Re Mexico I just had the idea that they backed the SW secessionists (a sort of distant descendent of the Aztlan/La Raza lot) and got Baja (by this point no longer contiguous) annexed for their trouble, while Yucatan saw its opportunity to break away.
May be a fair cop about the British...
Hmm, I think part of the problem is that the scenarios for this seem to differ wildly as to what a 'full polar ice cap melt' actually entails (compare this and this). Not everything below water level is going to be flooded and not everything above is going to remain dry. I generally did a hybrid of different 'full melt' scenarios (however unlikely this is by current scientific thought) and stirred in shrinking of freshwater lakes to reflect consumption/desertification, though it occurred to me that a world with more sea surface area is also going to be rainer; you might well get flash floods of freshwater.
Maybe the program Iori used lacked the data on the depth of Lake Baikal, and only computed its surface elevation.
I always thought Ecuador would have been included in Venezuela
Also, I would love to see a TL explain how the world got like that
I used the second result in a Google image search of Pangea Ultima. You're free to use it, sure.
This is based on Randy [1] McDonald's Empire Earth entry for the now sadly defunct Alternate History Travel Guides. Original writeup here: https://web.archive.org/web/20050209163344/http://ahtg.net/empguide.html https://web.archive.org/web/20050209161751/http://ahtg.net/emphist.html
Edit: Randy tells me something should be changed. I already have this big writeup, so I'll just do it as an alternate map a bit later.
It’s a world of Empires, some of which have partially crumbled, but what might be called Liberal Imperialism still dominates. Technology is a bit ahead of OTL in some fields, a bit behind in others. It’s a more conservative place, and relations with other timelines are a bit cool – other universes are seen as dangerously radical and disruptive to good order and civilized government. Nuclear weapons are fortunately very few – they have been kept scarce by international agreement since their invention – but recent revelations have shown that some countries have built up rather sizable arsenals of chemical and biological weapons on the sly, the manufacture and testing of such things on the sly being considerably easier than atomic warheads and missiles. France leads the world, the US fell hard in the early 20th century, and there is much soul-searching and What is To be Done speechifying after the horrific collapse of the world’s formerly most powerful empire.
This world initially diverges from ours in the Napoleonic era (note the continued union of Denmark and Norway) but the changes were small enough that the effects weren’t too noticeable until mid-century. A somewhat wilier Napoleon III decided an alliance with Austria vs. Prussia was more valuable than the dubious gratitude of the Savoyards, leading to the failure of the Italian Project. Meanwhile, worse Anglo-US relations, including a second US trial to snag Canada in the expansionist 1840s, led to considerable British passive assistance to the Confederacy, which became active when a US president rather more hotheaded than OTL’s Lincoln invaded Canada yet again in retaliation. France got in on the fun to balance US influence, and would remain as the Confederacy’s protector afterwards (the UK being too averse to slavery to make a long-term alliance with the slaveocracy). France also, with Confederate support, managed to establish a puppet emperor in Mexico.
The Great European War between the Franco-Austrian-Danish-Ottoman-odds and ends alliance vs. the Russo-Prussian-Spanish-odds and ends alliance ended in essentially a stalemate, with the UK negotiating a peace, but one in which the French alliance held the stronger cards: Prussia was definitively expelled from south Germany and lost some of the Rhinelands to France, but survived. Spain, which had fallen into revolution, was essentially thrown under the bus. Russia actually came out ahead, gaining some territory from Austria, which however got back some lands it had earlier lost to Prussia while the French were focused on America. The extreme costs and minor victories of the war led to the formation of the Congress of Strasbourg, a Great Powers Only version of the UN, to help negotiate conflicts territorial and otherwise in the future. (The Dutch were sort of an associate member tied to Great Britain for support and protection).
The Congress successfully negotiated and managed an era of imperial expansion over the next half century, during which the Ottoman Empire, Africa, and finally (after the collapse of the Manchu dynasty) were partitioned between the Great Powers. Japan managed, after a surprise victory over Russia, to join the club, and became the sole non-European member of the Congress of Strasbourg. Meanwhile, things went from bad to worse in North America, where after two bloody conflicts involving the US, the British, the Confederacy and Imperial Mexico, in which other Congress powers intervened to preserve the status quo, the US was taken over by a radical nationalist movement determined to reunify North America, take over Canada, etc. Fortunately for the peace of the rest of the world, their view that their aims would be best served by turning the US into a military dictatorship proved not to play well in Peoria, and after a decade of civil war the US fell apart entirely in 1921.
Brazil, which had seen steady growth under a continuing Imperial government, became the last power to join the Congress of Strasbourg, in 1927, and participated in the “fire sale” of Portugal’s decaying empire a generation later. With no successful Communist regimes, US “non-imperial” republicanism in tatters, no devastating world wars, and Japan inside the tent, so to speak, Imperial rule was slower to be challenged than OTL. Still, due to increasingly severe tariff wars between imperial blocks, and the need to keep up with the Joneses, so to speak (most specifically the enormous and unitary Russian Empire) led all of the Big Seven to move towards industrializing their colonies by the 1930s, with inevitable effects on the economic and political consciousness of the subject people. Various different approaches were taken to deal with these changes, of which the fairly whole-hearted French effort to make good Frenchmen out of tens of millions of Africans and Asians was probably the most whole-hearted, while the Prussians and Japanese at the other extreme merely sought better ways to tighten the screws.
Austria is nowadays the least of the Powers, having managed its relative decline in a civilized fashion, shedding troublesome areas as needed (allowing for northern, at least, Italy to finally unify), and running a very modest colonial empire (they regret having gotten involved in India). It’s a decentralized, somewhat inefficient sort of place, but it’s inhabitants like it: after a great deal of internal difficulty it has mostly purged itself of the racial and nationalist viruses of the 19th century, and mostly concentrates on fine living, the arts, and sciences while the rest of the world violently blunders around.
The fall of the First Confederacy in the 1940s was something of an object lesson in how bad things could get: an inability to attract immigrants and an out-migration of the ambitious and those who realized they could never afford slaves (by the 1940s “long-contract laborers”: same diff) led to a shrinking of the white population relative to a black population with no place to go and no available birth control. Due to a movement of slaves away from free borders and into the more agriculturally productive deep south, the population disparity became increasingly stark in the “black belt” area, and by the 1940s slave owners (pardon, “contract holders”) decided the labor supply was a bit excessive, and took steps which started with involuntary tube-tying and went downhill from there. A terrifying rumor that the government was planning to halve the black population by any means necessary spread and inspired a violent general uprising. Things soon descending into genocidal violence, the League of Strasbourg powers reluctantly got involved and enforced a partition.
Zion became something of a sore in the collective consciousness of the white imperial classes, and increased paranoia about the “subject races” in Britain and elsewhere, although the French continued to forge ahead with their efforts to make everyone love 300 varieties of cheese. It has not done as badly as the racist types had wished, if not as well as the more liberal-minded had hoped, being comparable to one of the richer Caribbean island states, is only second to Denmark as a source of anti-imperial snark (mainly because they’re so bloody serious about it), and is for every colonial activist on the run a home away from home (although they don’t host actual violent terrorists, at least where the Strasbourg powers can see them).
Australia, with fewer people moving to North America, is more populous and relatively richer than OTL, and has occasional fantasies of becoming a major power itself, something which its recent invitation to join the Congress of Strasbourg (see below) has exacerbated.
Chickens came home to roost in the 70s and 80s, as wealthier and better educated colonials pushed for self-government or direct participation in central imperial governance faster than ruling classes were willing to give them. While Austria and Brazil had few enough overseas subjects that they could essentially make them external provinces (and money whitened in Brazil), the French managed to stay (mostly) ahead of revolutionary explosion, and the Prussians and Japanese kept the lid down, the British Empire began to creak at the seams (the more unitary Russians had problems of their own, mostly due to continued autocratic rule and massive social inequality).
By the 1990s British efforts to crush rebellions in India and Africa had reached positively genocidal levels, and condemnation by the other Strasbourg powers led Britain to quit the Congress. Rebellions in Ireland and Canadian Quebec and their violent repression worsened tensions, and British execution of a large number of French “spies” and “provocateurs” was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The remaining Congress powers moved to “restore order.” Things nearly ended in the utter destruction of the British Empire, but thanks to the Interdimensional Transit Agency, a compromise peace was achieved, in which a million hard-line British refugees departed for ideologically more compatible dimensions, and the British parliament, after the departure of the British monarchy (tainted by its strong support of the hardline imperialists) accepted the Queen of the Netherlands as their new monarch, leading to the formation of the new Anglo-Dutch empire, minus some territories taken over by the other powers to Restore Order (or because they were conveniently located).
The Canadians however did not accept a “a bloody tulip-chewer” as queen, and broke away under an available descendant of the Georges vacationing in British Columbia, although Quebec’s departure to join the French empire soon led to the loss of the Maritime provinces as well.
India remains A Problem: India successfully gaining independence by violent revolt was seen as too damn provocative and setting a really bad example, so the Powers moved in to reestablish Responsible (in other words, obedient to some Empire or other) government. This proved difficult enough that a rump Indian state survives in the north and continues to stir up trouble among Hindus elsewhere, although it’s currently a nasty enough dictatorship to act as a Bad Example.
Russia took over British Persia, Afghanistan, and NW Muslim India, and divided British China with Japan. This proved a bit too much to swallow, and a Muslim uprising was followed in 1998 by a Chinese one. And then some idiot assassinated the Czar.
Fearing a British-type collapse, an extremist Council of National Salvation took over and set to work restoring order by mass murder, keeping the rest of the world at bay with the threat of using chemical and biological weapons against the other powers (this world has nuclear weapons, but very few) and demonstrating their willingness to use them by actually deploying some against their colonial subjects. In a quicker, bloodier, and even nastier reprise of the US civil war of 1911-1921, the Council clashed with the “liberal imperialist” faction led by prince Alexei III and his aunt Olga (considered a living saint by many of the Orthodox faithful). The Liberal forces finally triumphed in late 1999 when the Council’s deep bunker under Moscow went up in a nuclear fireball at the cost of five million lives (the Liberal forces claim it wasn’t them). Russia avoided total collapse, but lost most of its non-Russian areas, even the Ukraine gaining such devolution of powers as to become effectively independent. Out of control engineered plagues burning through China, south and central Asia, killed tens of millions, and aside from those fried in nuclear fire as many as 15 million more Russians died in the fighting, executed as “traitors”, or came down with diseases coming back to Russia from contaminated areas.
Post-war, a major reexamination of the entire imperial system is underway, with even the Japanese and Prussians moving slowly towards at least partial enfranchisement of their colonial populations. The Council of Strasbourg has admitted Australia, China, California, Peru, Ukraine, Mexico and Gran Colombia as new non-voting members, and there is talk of perhaps letting in one or two of the unaligned North American republics. Huge sums are being raised to help out the devastated areas of the former Russian Empire. There has been talk of recognizing Bharat, as long as it stops stirring up Hindu rebellion outside its territories (so far there has been a distinct lack of positive response). Russia is now for the first time a genuinely constitutional monarchy, and the most recent polls indicate the new French parliament will be nearly a third non-European.
The French Empire is in fact in the lead in trying to create a post-racial (if still Frenchified) imperial identity, although it continues to have difficulties dealing with its Muslim subjects. A democratic global federation is the ultimate ideal, although the relative power of center and peripheries – and the degree of influence of the peripheries on the center – remain in dispute. The now quite sizeable African and SE Asian middle classes are a very positive sign for the future, but North Africa and the middle east remain difficult. (Things were not helped at all by the discovery that the Kingdom of Nejd had been supporting the more extremist Muslim factions in the Russian civil war and the post-war chaotic aftermath, and the subsequent Great Power reaction.) And in the American Union, ambitious Mexican politicians wonder if the capital of that world Federation might one day move from Paris to Mexico city…
Bruce
[1] No longer apparently in the AH business, but still on the web here: http://rfmcdpei.livejournal.com/
__________________
Edit: Randy tells me something should be changed. I already have this big writeup, so I'll just do it as an alternate map a bit later.
It’s a world of Empires, some of which have partially crumbled, but what might be called Liberal Imperialism still dominates. Technology is a bit ahead of OTL in some fields, a bit behind in others. It’s a more conservative place, and relations with other timelines are a bit cool – other universes are seen as dangerously radical and disruptive to good order and civilized government. Nuclear weapons are fortunately very few – they have been kept scarce by international agreement since their invention – but recent revelations have shown that some countries have built up rather sizable arsenals of chemical and biological weapons on the sly, the manufacture and testing of such things on the sly being considerably easier than atomic warheads and missiles. France leads the world, the US fell hard in the early 20th century, and there is much soul-searching and What is To be Done speechifying after the horrific collapse of the world’s formerly most powerful empire.
This world initially diverges from ours in the Napoleonic era (note the continued union of Denmark and Norway) but the changes were small enough that the effects weren’t too noticeable until mid-century. A somewhat wilier Napoleon III decided an alliance with Austria vs. Prussia was more valuable than the dubious gratitude of the Savoyards, leading to the failure of the Italian Project. Meanwhile, worse Anglo-US relations, including a second US trial to snag Canada in the expansionist 1840s, led to considerable British passive assistance to the Confederacy, which became active when a US president rather more hotheaded than OTL’s Lincoln invaded Canada yet again in retaliation. France got in on the fun to balance US influence, and would remain as the Confederacy’s protector afterwards (the UK being too averse to slavery to make a long-term alliance with the slaveocracy). France also, with Confederate support, managed to establish a puppet emperor in Mexico.
The Great European War between the Franco-Austrian-Danish-Ottoman-odds and ends alliance vs. the Russo-Prussian-Spanish-odds and ends alliance ended in essentially a stalemate, with the UK negotiating a peace, but one in which the French alliance held the stronger cards: Prussia was definitively expelled from south Germany and lost some of the Rhinelands to France, but survived. Spain, which had fallen into revolution, was essentially thrown under the bus. Russia actually came out ahead, gaining some territory from Austria, which however got back some lands it had earlier lost to Prussia while the French were focused on America. The extreme costs and minor victories of the war led to the formation of the Congress of Strasbourg, a Great Powers Only version of the UN, to help negotiate conflicts territorial and otherwise in the future. (The Dutch were sort of an associate member tied to Great Britain for support and protection).
The Congress successfully negotiated and managed an era of imperial expansion over the next half century, during which the Ottoman Empire, Africa, and finally (after the collapse of the Manchu dynasty) were partitioned between the Great Powers. Japan managed, after a surprise victory over Russia, to join the club, and became the sole non-European member of the Congress of Strasbourg. Meanwhile, things went from bad to worse in North America, where after two bloody conflicts involving the US, the British, the Confederacy and Imperial Mexico, in which other Congress powers intervened to preserve the status quo, the US was taken over by a radical nationalist movement determined to reunify North America, take over Canada, etc. Fortunately for the peace of the rest of the world, their view that their aims would be best served by turning the US into a military dictatorship proved not to play well in Peoria, and after a decade of civil war the US fell apart entirely in 1921.
Brazil, which had seen steady growth under a continuing Imperial government, became the last power to join the Congress of Strasbourg, in 1927, and participated in the “fire sale” of Portugal’s decaying empire a generation later. With no successful Communist regimes, US “non-imperial” republicanism in tatters, no devastating world wars, and Japan inside the tent, so to speak, Imperial rule was slower to be challenged than OTL. Still, due to increasingly severe tariff wars between imperial blocks, and the need to keep up with the Joneses, so to speak (most specifically the enormous and unitary Russian Empire) led all of the Big Seven to move towards industrializing their colonies by the 1930s, with inevitable effects on the economic and political consciousness of the subject people. Various different approaches were taken to deal with these changes, of which the fairly whole-hearted French effort to make good Frenchmen out of tens of millions of Africans and Asians was probably the most whole-hearted, while the Prussians and Japanese at the other extreme merely sought better ways to tighten the screws.
Austria is nowadays the least of the Powers, having managed its relative decline in a civilized fashion, shedding troublesome areas as needed (allowing for northern, at least, Italy to finally unify), and running a very modest colonial empire (they regret having gotten involved in India). It’s a decentralized, somewhat inefficient sort of place, but it’s inhabitants like it: after a great deal of internal difficulty it has mostly purged itself of the racial and nationalist viruses of the 19th century, and mostly concentrates on fine living, the arts, and sciences while the rest of the world violently blunders around.
The fall of the First Confederacy in the 1940s was something of an object lesson in how bad things could get: an inability to attract immigrants and an out-migration of the ambitious and those who realized they could never afford slaves (by the 1940s “long-contract laborers”: same diff) led to a shrinking of the white population relative to a black population with no place to go and no available birth control. Due to a movement of slaves away from free borders and into the more agriculturally productive deep south, the population disparity became increasingly stark in the “black belt” area, and by the 1940s slave owners (pardon, “contract holders”) decided the labor supply was a bit excessive, and took steps which started with involuntary tube-tying and went downhill from there. A terrifying rumor that the government was planning to halve the black population by any means necessary spread and inspired a violent general uprising. Things soon descending into genocidal violence, the League of Strasbourg powers reluctantly got involved and enforced a partition.
Zion became something of a sore in the collective consciousness of the white imperial classes, and increased paranoia about the “subject races” in Britain and elsewhere, although the French continued to forge ahead with their efforts to make everyone love 300 varieties of cheese. It has not done as badly as the racist types had wished, if not as well as the more liberal-minded had hoped, being comparable to one of the richer Caribbean island states, is only second to Denmark as a source of anti-imperial snark (mainly because they’re so bloody serious about it), and is for every colonial activist on the run a home away from home (although they don’t host actual violent terrorists, at least where the Strasbourg powers can see them).
Australia, with fewer people moving to North America, is more populous and relatively richer than OTL, and has occasional fantasies of becoming a major power itself, something which its recent invitation to join the Congress of Strasbourg (see below) has exacerbated.
Chickens came home to roost in the 70s and 80s, as wealthier and better educated colonials pushed for self-government or direct participation in central imperial governance faster than ruling classes were willing to give them. While Austria and Brazil had few enough overseas subjects that they could essentially make them external provinces (and money whitened in Brazil), the French managed to stay (mostly) ahead of revolutionary explosion, and the Prussians and Japanese kept the lid down, the British Empire began to creak at the seams (the more unitary Russians had problems of their own, mostly due to continued autocratic rule and massive social inequality).
By the 1990s British efforts to crush rebellions in India and Africa had reached positively genocidal levels, and condemnation by the other Strasbourg powers led Britain to quit the Congress. Rebellions in Ireland and Canadian Quebec and their violent repression worsened tensions, and British execution of a large number of French “spies” and “provocateurs” was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The remaining Congress powers moved to “restore order.” Things nearly ended in the utter destruction of the British Empire, but thanks to the Interdimensional Transit Agency, a compromise peace was achieved, in which a million hard-line British refugees departed for ideologically more compatible dimensions, and the British parliament, after the departure of the British monarchy (tainted by its strong support of the hardline imperialists) accepted the Queen of the Netherlands as their new monarch, leading to the formation of the new Anglo-Dutch empire, minus some territories taken over by the other powers to Restore Order (or because they were conveniently located).
The Canadians however did not accept a “a bloody tulip-chewer” as queen, and broke away under an available descendant of the Georges vacationing in British Columbia, although Quebec’s departure to join the French empire soon led to the loss of the Maritime provinces as well.
India remains A Problem: India successfully gaining independence by violent revolt was seen as too damn provocative and setting a really bad example, so the Powers moved in to reestablish Responsible (in other words, obedient to some Empire or other) government. This proved difficult enough that a rump Indian state survives in the north and continues to stir up trouble among Hindus elsewhere, although it’s currently a nasty enough dictatorship to act as a Bad Example.
Russia took over British Persia, Afghanistan, and NW Muslim India, and divided British China with Japan. This proved a bit too much to swallow, and a Muslim uprising was followed in 1998 by a Chinese one. And then some idiot assassinated the Czar.
Fearing a British-type collapse, an extremist Council of National Salvation took over and set to work restoring order by mass murder, keeping the rest of the world at bay with the threat of using chemical and biological weapons against the other powers (this world has nuclear weapons, but very few) and demonstrating their willingness to use them by actually deploying some against their colonial subjects. In a quicker, bloodier, and even nastier reprise of the US civil war of 1911-1921, the Council clashed with the “liberal imperialist” faction led by prince Alexei III and his aunt Olga (considered a living saint by many of the Orthodox faithful). The Liberal forces finally triumphed in late 1999 when the Council’s deep bunker under Moscow went up in a nuclear fireball at the cost of five million lives (the Liberal forces claim it wasn’t them). Russia avoided total collapse, but lost most of its non-Russian areas, even the Ukraine gaining such devolution of powers as to become effectively independent. Out of control engineered plagues burning through China, south and central Asia, killed tens of millions, and aside from those fried in nuclear fire as many as 15 million more Russians died in the fighting, executed as “traitors”, or came down with diseases coming back to Russia from contaminated areas.
Post-war, a major reexamination of the entire imperial system is underway, with even the Japanese and Prussians moving slowly towards at least partial enfranchisement of their colonial populations. The Council of Strasbourg has admitted Australia, China, California, Peru, Ukraine, Mexico and Gran Colombia as new non-voting members, and there is talk of perhaps letting in one or two of the unaligned North American republics. Huge sums are being raised to help out the devastated areas of the former Russian Empire. There has been talk of recognizing Bharat, as long as it stops stirring up Hindu rebellion outside its territories (so far there has been a distinct lack of positive response). Russia is now for the first time a genuinely constitutional monarchy, and the most recent polls indicate the new French parliament will be nearly a third non-European.
The French Empire is in fact in the lead in trying to create a post-racial (if still Frenchified) imperial identity, although it continues to have difficulties dealing with its Muslim subjects. A democratic global federation is the ultimate ideal, although the relative power of center and peripheries – and the degree of influence of the peripheries on the center – remain in dispute. The now quite sizeable African and SE Asian middle classes are a very positive sign for the future, but North Africa and the middle east remain difficult. (Things were not helped at all by the discovery that the Kingdom of Nejd had been supporting the more extremist Muslim factions in the Russian civil war and the post-war chaotic aftermath, and the subsequent Great Power reaction.) And in the American Union, ambitious Mexican politicians wonder if the capital of that world Federation might one day move from Paris to Mexico city…
Bruce
[1] No longer apparently in the AH business, but still on the web here: http://rfmcdpei.livejournal.com/
__________________
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