Once again help needed on a map and the courses of Rivers

[Opaste]

Thanks for the great advice

I added two red lines to the map, the shorter one represents 1000 kilometers, and the longer one 5000 kilometers. So yes, the continent is pretty massive.

The point you made about there being an upper limit on how far water will travel from the ocean worries me. The great river which travel from the great northern forest all the way through the continent and into the southern sea (which is kind of like the Mediterranean) is one of the most important trade routes on the whole continent, so I can't really change the course of the river, even if the river turns out to be unrealistically long.

Basically all the lands west of the river (the area marked "A") are relatively dry anyway, they are grasslands where mongolian style tribal nomads herd their livestock, and the place looks basically like something between the American prairie and the Mongolian steppe. So even if the central part of the continent (the area marked "B") is really dry to the point of being a desert or very arid steppe, it kind of suits the general climate of the place and its cultures.

What I'm concerned about is whether or not that dry climate affects my precious river. Will the ground be so overly dry that it will hungrily absorb all the river's water, or will the river be unaffected by its dry surroundings. I admit it does feel a bit weird if a huge river as wide as the Mississippi will happily flow through a desert, but maybe it does happen. And if the river really can flow through an extreme arid steppe or even a desert, I'd assume the muddy riverbanks could support all kinds of plant life, so despite the dry surroundings plants, animals and people would presumably gather near the river since it would the only place for hundreds of kilometers around which could actually properly support life.

And if the unfortunate fact about there being a limit on how far water will travel from the ocean would also make my river impossible, how could I fix the situation? Would I need to ad a shallow interior sea or a massive lake to provide moisture (though where would that sea or lake get its water from?), or could rainclouds reach from the southern (Mediterranean type) sea to the north and bring rain to the central parts of the continent?

So as long as the Great river follows roughly the course it does now, everything's fine. And if the massive size of the continent makes it impossible for the river flow that way, I will just need to add more sources of moisture or whatever is needed to make the river plausible

[waldronate]

Is this an earth-sized planet (40000 km circumference)? If so, the north pole is going to go right on that little plain north of the great forest if that continent is indeed 10000 km in latitude extent. I've added some distance lines for reference to your map and attached the results. For a 40000km circumference world, rhe horizontal lines are the equator (0), 45 degree latitude, and 90 degrees latitude (pole). There would be undoubtedly be some projection effects on there that would make the lines not straight, but it's enough to get the idea. The location of your forest would be in the arctic ocean or in antarctica if it were here on earth. My math is suspect at the best of times, but I think I'm close on this one (40000 km total, half for a hemisphere, half again for equator to pole - should be 10000 km).



If the mountains in the north are a frozen wasteland, then the simplest explanation for the forest simply involves heat to melt ice. Admittedly, there usually isn't a lot of moisture in the really high latitudes because it mostly freezes out before it can get there. Weather pattern would be key here and you'd need a larger map to show other (if any) continents to get a good picture of those patterns. Of course, if this is the only continent, then there will be some really spectacular storms that could dump a whole lot of moisture on those mountains. Enough moisture and the glaciers will march down out of those high polar mountains and melt when they hit the volcanic province that is responsible for the large area that the forest sits in. It would play hell with the other cultures that you had in mind for the surrounding areas, but it would be very scenic.

[amberroberts09]

Is this an earth-sized planet (40000 km circumference)? If so, the north pole is going to go right on that little plain north of the great forest if that continent is indeed 10000 km in latitude extent. I've added some distance lines for reference to your map and attached the results. For a 40000km circumference world, rhe horizontal lines are the equator (0), 45 degree latitude, and 90 degrees latitude (pole). There would be undoubtedly be some projection effects on there that would make the lines not straight, but it's enough to get the idea. The location of your forest would be in the arctic ocean or in antarctica if it were here on earth. My math is suspect at the best of times, but I think I'm close on this one (40000 km total, half for a hemisphere, half again for equator to pole - should be 10000 km).



If the mountains in the north are a frozen wasteland, then the simplest explanation for the forest simply involves heat to melt ice. Admittedly, there usually isn't a lot of moisture in the really high latitudes because it mostly freezes out before it can get there. Weather pattern would be key here and you'd need a larger map to show other (if any) continents to get a good picture of those patterns. Of course, if this is the only continent, then there will be some really spectacular storms that could dump a whole lot of moisture on those mountains. Enough moisture and the glaciers will march down out of those high polar mountains and melt when they hit the volcanic province that is responsible for the large area that the forest sits in. It would play hell with the other cultures that you had in mind for the surrounding areas, but it would be very scenic.

What are the A and B point.

[Opaste]

Is this an earth-sized planet (40000 km circumference)? If so, the north pole is going to go right on that little plain north of the great forest if that continent is indeed 10000 km in latitude extent. I've added some distance lines for reference to your map and attached the results. For a 40000km circumference world, rhe horizontal lines are the equator (0), 45 degree latitude, and 90 degrees latitude (pole). There would be undoubtedly be some projection effects on there that would make the lines not straight, but it's enough to get the idea. The location of your forest would be in the arctic ocean or in antarctica if it were here on earth. My math is suspect at the best of times, but I think I'm close on this one (40000 km total, half for a hemisphere, half again for equator to pole - should be 10000 km).



If the mountains in the north are a frozen wasteland, then the simplest explanation for the forest simply involves heat to melt ice. Admittedly, there usually isn't a lot of moisture in the really high latitudes because it mostly freezes out before it can get there. Weather pattern would be key here and you'd need a larger map to show other (if any) continents to get a good picture of those patterns. Of course, if this is the only continent, then there will be some really spectacular storms that could dump a whole lot of moisture on those mountains. Enough moisture and the glaciers will march down out of those high polar mountains and melt when they hit the volcanic province that is responsible for the large area that the forest sits in. It would play hell with the other cultures that you had in mind for the surrounding areas, but it would be very scenic.

Now that I think about it, I think this planet would probably end up quite a bit bigger than Earth. There's another continent of roughly equal size to the east (in fact if the map was a bit wider we could see part of the western coast of that Easter continent), and I've always imagined that the Northernmost tip of this continent (the part just above the Great forest) would look pretty much like the Nordic Lapland, which I think is something like 67-70 degrees latitude. Lapland does get very much snow every winter, but during the summer months it does completely thaw.

So if that northern tip of the continent really was just 70 degrees latitude, and therefore the actual north pole would be quite a bit farther north, the planet would probably end up quite massive. Though I'm really not sure exactly how massive, since Math isn't really my strongest point :p