One advantage of writing fiction is that you don’t actually have to explain or justify this stuff. IMHO a ten year winter would be very hard to survive without modern methods like tins.
Welcome to Australia mate.
Clearly all you need is a groundhog and conditions in which occasionally shadows may be cast.
The only plausible way I can think of is a planet in a binary star system that is somehow in a semi-stable but chaotic orbit. I’m not sure that’s actually possible though.
This was probably it:
5 Scientific Explanations for Game of Thrones’ Messed-Up Seasons
Pretty close to what’s been said here; planet wobbling on its axis, elongated orbit, etc. Nothing about a binary star, though (presumably there’s only one star in the books).
ISTR that tides are a function of distance cubed. So, way back when the moon was much closer you had tides in the hundreds to thousands of feet high. That must have been exciting.
What you need is planet with an unstable climate. And some randomness in the system that flips it from one state to another.
Lets say “something” causes the planet to have a extremely cold winter and lots of snow builds up. And summer just doesn’t melt enough that year. So next year is worse and worse and worse till all of sudden most places are just buried in snow most of the year.
Or the opposite. Really warm summer combined with weak winter. Less snow next year, less sunlight being reflected off, each year gets warmer and warmer and before you know it snow and the associated cold are a rare thing.
Then you need something to reverse those two processes once in awhile so they don’t become the permanent state.
I’ve got some ideas, but too busy to talk about em now.
You’d still have seasons, but they could either be sorta warm and mostly cold or sorta warm and damn hot depending on what state the planet was in at the time.
Aren’t the vast majority of orbits involving 3 similarily massive objects unstable? So 3 planets clos e together would keep messing the orbits up and so the seasons
regarding why they use years at all, i think maybe they use however many sideral days, since the planet’s rotation isn’t messed up
(spoilers??)
[sub][sub]or maybe it’s the dragons[/sub][/sub]
I interpret a Westerosi year as one revolution around its sun, and 365 day/night cycles, and 12 phases of their moon. In other words: Earth time.
But a Westerosi year will be warm for a whole year. You’ll plant a crop at a certain point within the year; it will grow for a certain period of time within the year; and you will harvest it at another certain point within the year. You will do the same next year. And the next. And then one year it’s cooler than the previous year. Then cooler yet again. Then BAM! it’s fucking winter, and will be for ten years. Then two, three, etc. successively warmer years (spring), then an indeterminate number of years of warmth (summer), ad nauseum.
Which brings up another question; does the southern hemisphere of the planet have the same seasons as the northern hemisphere (where Westeros & Essos are), or are they flipped like on Earth?
Note that it doesn’t actually have to be a star. It could be a super Jovian planet, big enough to really mess up orbits and seasons.
As for binary systems, I always preferred the Flying Sorcerors world.
Again, it is not necessary to have eccentric or chaotic celestial kinematics to explain irregularities in the seasons. A purely climatological anomaly, such as varying compositions of the upper atmosphere or irregular flow patterns in ocean currents may be sufficient to cause an apparently years long winter ‘season’.
Westeros appears to be fairly technically advanced (ability to navigate oceans, elaborate recordkeeping, almost universal literacy among the mercantile and ruling classes, universal trade languages, et cetera) on par with a late medieval periods of Asia and Europe. It would be suprising if they did not have at least sufficient fundamentals of astronomical observation to detect and at least predict dramatic changes in celestical conditions (shifting of constellations, sudden lengthening of the day, et cetera) commiserate with such a large change in orbital properties even if they do not have the mathematics to describe Keplerian orbital mechanics.
Stranger
The real answer for Game of Thrones is that when Ice Demons get uppity, you get winter. When Ice Demons get wimpy, you get summer.
A plausible explanation would simply be that the Sun is variable, if the sun’s luminosity decreases for years at a time you get years of winter, when the sun’s luminosity increases you get years of summer. No orbital mechanics necessary.
Consider the phases of the moon - which affect the occurrence of Ramadan, Jewish lunar months, etc. The phases of the moon in no way line up with the solar cycle, so Ramadan changes each year.
The same could apply for a messed-up season planet. You have axial tilt, which causes variable radiation to hit a plant during its orbit.
Consider other causes:
The planet could orbit a binary system. If it orbits close to one star, it may get “close encounters” with the second sun in an elliptical orbit, which means sometimes you miss winter as the second sun approaches; sometimes you get long winters because there is not enough sunlight, the second sun is far away. However, the period of the binary would likely be much much longer than a year or else the planet’s orbit would not be stable. (Think Jupiter orbit, 10 years…)
Maybe the planet orbits around a close binary pair; thus, as the pair eclipse, or the brighter one is the closer one, not the dimmer, or you see both, the total sunlight changes (Tantooine?). However, the two stars would not be very far apart (hence, a period of a month or less, say) or else the planet’s orbit would again be unstable.
Maybe it’s not a planet but a moon of a Jupiter gas giant. Now, the timing of that orbit vs. the solar orbits means that sometimes the sun is blocked during the summer (cool summers) sometimes it is blocked during the winter (colder winters). Total solar illumination may affect global weather patterns, even if the people live on the other side of the world and don’t see the gas giant. Again, transit times (blocking the sun) are much shorter than the total orbit.
If you have multiple cycles that are not harmonic multiples, you can get relatively irregular effects; but the educated class certainly will figure out the pattern eventually, especially as the causes are obvious in the sky.
The problem is - 3 body orbits can be stable, but not in “close quarters”. If the bodies are close in size, or too far apart, then the second-order disturbances come into play and one body will crash or go flying off. Earth has the moon - much smaller, and earth is 400 times the distance from the sun as from the moon, orbital period 4. Jupiter has moons with periods of almost 2 years, but it takes 10 years to go around the sun. Callisto has a 16-day period compared to Jupiter’s 10-year “year”. The relative distance is 1.9M km vs. 1.5B km.
Also, if the orbit is highly elliptical - the orbiting body will spend a lot more time at the distant end of the orbit, and zips around the near pass quickly; so a typical highly elliptical planet will spend most of its time in winter. The trick would be to devise a configuration that does not spend most of its time in freezing, but does not create episodes where the sun boils off all the life on the planet.
It’s not difficult to imagine plants that can survive long, cold winters and burst into life if a short, lively “spring” occurs. Ditto for insects and many cold-blooded animals. The problem would be devising a survival strategy for mammals that have to eat enough to stay warm, forage in an incredibly cold hostile environment, and find a reliable food supply for up to 10 years.
Polar bears will store up to a 6 month supply of fat; and they fish their own fat supplies out of the sea as seals. Penguins also store a fat layer collectd from fish that eat plankton - which assumes you have open seas. Near the poles, the seas start to freeze over…
Does anyone read through the thread? Stranger On A Train provided pretty plausible explanations twice, and discredited the orbital mechanics as being a likely reason. Yet everyone just ignores it and posts their own guesses.
We have no idea. Even in the books, the “southern continent” (if there’s more than one, we’ve never heard of it,) is called Sothoros, but we never go there, and only hear tales about it.
In keeping with the “Westeros = Europe, Essos = Asia” theme, Sothoros is pretty much Africa.
And AFAIK, we’ve never seen an official map that is accurately projected onto a globe, so we don’t know where the equator is. It could be pretty much anywhere from right in the middle of Dorne, to so far down it’s “off the map,” as it were.
I don’t know… Climactic shifts (upper atmosphere) are equally implausible. Have you ever been out in the summer sun, even in Canada’s latitudes? It’s friggin hot. You would need some serious upper atmosphere disturbances to nullify that level of extra heat. Likewise, it would be hard to create summer conditions with the paltry sunlight that you get in winter. If all this happened in a neutral situation (along the equator, no seasons) the inhabitable band would probably not be that wide.
Similarly, orbital mechanics and binary stars, for example, would likely mean two or three non-harmonic periods that would produce relatively chaotic seasons - but the multiple periods would be significantly different - like our moon cycle, which is 12 times our sun cycle; or Jupiter, 10 years per cycle. We forget the past civilizations, lacking air conditioning and TV, spent a lot of time watching the sky; the pattern would be entirely predictable by the time civilization reached the Roman/medieval stage.
Plus, medieval life so beloved of fantasy writers consisted of a small group of nobles living off the backs of a massive number of barely subsistent farmers. Often in a bad year, many peasants did not survive a 4-month winter. What would allow them to survive 10 years?
Naita had a better explanation.
Well, a few things:
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Most winters haven’t lasted ten years. From the show/books, we get the impression most summers and winters average 2-3 years. It’s just that this last summer has been exceptionally long (I think over 7 years,) and “long summers bring long winters,” so they are all expecting the coming winter to last 7-10 years.
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A large chunk of the continent gets mild to no winters, like the American south and southwest. They can grow lots of crops year round, even in winter. The same is true of Essos. In fact, most of Essos doesn’t seem to get “real” winter, at least that’s the impression I’ve gotten from the books/show.
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There is a VAST trade network in place in Westeros and Essos. Owing to the continents small size, especially being “narrow”, so even places in the middle aren’t too far from shore, relatively. So even the places in the north can get access to food. I have no idea what they trade with…maybe the south really likes snowcones?
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The nobles/lords KNOW that they have to prepare for long winters, so they make their vassals give more than their usually amount of food to them for storage, so that come winter, it can be rationed out back to them.
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Plenty of societies throughout the ages have lived in areas that were “winter” essentially year round. They got by from fishing, hunting, etc…No reason to think the people of Westeros can’t do the same.
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All that being said, yeah, plenty will still die. Nature of the beast. But not everyone (well, now that The War of the Five Kings killed thousands of peasants and decimated lots of cropland, much more than usual will probably die…)
You are aware, I assume, that paleoclimatological records of the Earth’s history from geological and polar ice sources have shown many cycles of global temperature variation from near-freezing average temperatures in the tropic latitudes to temperate weather at the poles. On shorter timescales (in the hundreds of years) we’ve seen temperature variations which are strongly correlated to the rise and fall of various regimes and entire civilizations, such as Bond events of the North Atlantic. It would not be unreasonable to assume that the world of Game of Thrones may experience similar but more frequent climatological variations owing to any number of different conditions (distribution of oceans and currents; composition of the atmosphere; accumulation and modulation of polar ice). It may well be that magic (e.g. “the gods”, fluctuations in the manna, et cetera) are fundamentally responsible for the variations, but since we do not see any evidence of direction actions of gods or other supernatural entities* (and the formulation of gods apes traditional pre-medieval cultures) any controlling intelligence is presumably still acting through natural forces rather than being completely arbitrary.
The problem with all of the attempts to rationalize the fluctuations of climate in terms of orbital mechanics involving non-elliptical orbits almost always require a very narrow set of parameters (e.g. a binary star system in which the two stars are either unreasonably close orbiting or one is far enough to not eject planets about the other but still close enough to significantly affect their orbits) that are generally easily perturbed. It is possible to construct such systems intentionally, but attempting to simulate the formulation of a system with large bodies in non-periodic orbits invaribly demonstrates that they are unstable over periods of time that would be insufficient to evolve advanced life. Of course, one could again invoke gods as arbiters of this otherwise unstable system, but it would probably be much easier (at least, on an energy basis) and more subtle to influence ocean currents and atmospheric flows rather than manipulate orbits.
*To be clear, we have seen apparently supernatural acts, such as shadow span that kills Renly Baratheon, and Beric Dondarrian being resurrected, but neither has been obviously conducted by a god or supernatural entity.
Stranger
Because it is contra-indicated by the point first made by alphaboi, that the Maesters know that Winter is coming by checking the length of days. So it’s not simply meteorogical or atmospheric, there has to be a extra-planetary component to it to explain observed phenomena.
Although personally I’m OK with the WordOfGod explanation that “It’s magic”
That’s also what it actually is. The author has said that there isn’t a “real world” reason that it’s happening, and that it is supernatural/magic. He hasn’t said beyond that, so we might find out the details, we might not.