It’s a map of the Earth, with land and water reversed. So, the continents are now oceans, and vice versa. It’s a pretty interesting idea.
Obviously, if this were real, Earth’s surface would be more land than water, and the total amount of water on Earth would be far lower. I presume that Earth’s climate would be very, very different.
I assume there’s no reason why this situation couldn’t physically happen. But on the map, virtually all of the new land area is divided up into various nation-states, which assumes that it’s all habitable.
My question is this: if this is what the Earth actually looked like, how much land would actually be habitable. Wouldn’t the inland areas be barren deserts? I imagine that people would only be able to easily live within a few miles of the oceans.
Am I wrong in assuming that an arrangement like this is even physically possible (maybe the atmosphere would be so dry that any surface water would evaporate)?
It may not be what you’re looking for, but I’d imagine that there would be more contact between nations, to the point that all the land would be known from antiquity and you wouldn’t have our Earth’s “age of discovery”, or it would have happened much earlier.
It’s interesting that there are fewer islands than in our world: the major ones being the Caspian Island (to the east of the Black Peninsula) and the Great Islands (in the United Ocean).
I’d be more concerned about the size of the Australian Sheep (in Eastern Indian Kingdom) then anything else. They’re huge.
But realistically, ISTM the problem we’d have would be over population. We have it now, but with how many more people that much land would support I’d think we’d run out of resources a lot sooner.
IIRC, the biggest mass extinction in the history of the Earth was due to either the breakup or the formation (I can’t remember which) of a supercontinent, from the huge ecological change like you describe.
I think, also, that the mechanics of plate tectonics would ensure that even on a world with less water, the low regions would still be contiguous.
Why would the oceanic mountains still be peaks, when what’s primarily reversed on this map is the highlands (formerly the land, “now” the water)? I’m not expressing myself very clearly, but do you get what I’m asking about anyway? Are the Himalayas still the highest place in the “waters” or are they lowest? Wouldn’t the tip of Everest (and many other mountains) now be islands?
I think a fictional map could create its topography however it wants, prr. A complete inversion of altitude makes a lot of sense for a map like this, but makes little sense in geophysical terms. You would have massive shallow seabeds in some places, and impossibly steep cliff faces in others. “Mazama Island” (south of the Puget Peninsula and San Juan Lakes area) would be a high island peak containing a small lake one side, and surrounded by a deep trench. Most of the lakes in the Pacific would be located in a series of pits in what is largely tableland.
I’m curious if that was the way you went, just how much water would be available for the planet, assuming you take all volume of land above sea level as the volume of your oceans.
You could go another way and shift the baseline. This would make the Marianas a vast canyon, deeper than the oceans. I suppose Everest would then be barely at water level, and all shorelines would be sharply discontinuous. That would seem to have the problem of rivers not flowing into lakes or the ocean the way you’d expect.
(Incidentally, I’d bet it’s relatively easy to construct both of these types of maps using existing digital mapping methods. Mostly just inverting some numbers, though I doubt most tools or records are set up by default to work that way.)
i’m no geologist but i think this would be a pretty terrible place to live. there is SO much less water that i’m having difficulty even imagining where fresh water would come from. the land masses are so much higher that groundwater is… thousands of feet lower than they are currently. MAYBE there’d be a few rivers, maybe? l
Such a world would probably be more icebound then ours. The “Arctic Lands” would be glacier covered like Antarctica is in real life, while the “Antarctic Ocean” wouldn’t have any outlets for exchanging warmer water for cooler.
The map doesn’t show just how huge the Pacific supercontinent would be- virtually a hemisphere of the planet. I agree that much of it might be desert.
Quite the contrary! As I imagine it, every pond or lake in our world would be an island in that world. The map as shown has far too little detail, but think seriously: The mountains and the great plains and the big deserts would be oceans, but many other areas would look like Venice.
Consider that world’s version of New York City, on the northwest coast of the North Atlantic States: Lake Manhattan would have almost no land at all, except for the Central Park Islands. The OP’s map makes it look like there’s nothing but water north and west of there, but actually there would be a vast network of islands and such. For example, the Hudson Peninsula would take you north past Lake Albany. From there you’d take the Erie Keys west to the Detroit Sea. And so on.
You have to wonder what would happen to rivers, though… Is there a narrow but unbroken Mississippi Ridge running halfway up the United Ocean, branching off into similar Ohio and Missouri Ridges? It’s easy enough to interchange islands with lakes or ponds, but our world doesn’t really have anything resembling the inverse of a river.
I wonder what it would look like if you inverted altitude at sea level while keeping the water volume the same. Then imagine how it would look after erosion took hold. Obviously Marianas range would erode very quickly.
A world were all continents were seas and vice versa would neccesarily have a lot less water, not only because continents cover less area, but because the continents aren’t as high as the oceans are deep.
