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I have a question about a possible Deluge/Global flood/waterworld fiction. Just to clarify that I am not asking if my proposed idea is possible in real life but rather if it is plausible and would allow suspension of disbelief. It's somewhat soft Sci-fi I think world.

So basically this fictional world is the earth if it was completely flooded with some exception which the top of Mount Everest. Obviously in such a world wood would be complicated to obtain but all human civilization is on various water craft.

So my solution was to introduce floating coral islands. Some float on the surface and some at different other depth below the surface. Those corals also has face some genetic modification making them similar to wood. Basically most of the wood supply in my world is from these. They are also ecosystems that allow different life forms to grow around them, also they are not fixed, rather they move with the current and can break up into smaller reef or form bigger ones. They exist in part due to early human involvement after the flood. Some civilization participated in the effort of genetically modifying corals and let them grow naturally to have access to the resource later. So they don't appear out of nowhere.

Is this plausible/good?

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  • $\begingroup$ I doubt this would work. The primary ingredient of a corals protective shell is calcium carbonate (CC) or lime stone, the corals themselves excrete a shell of CC as a means of protecting themselves from predation and protection from the elements. Without the that shell? The polyps are easy prey for other marine life & you wouldn't have a 'raft anyway. With the shell? As a floating colony grew in size eventually it will reach a point where the weight of CC drags the raft down, especially with added weight on top. Have you considered some form of genetically engineered plant or algae matting? $\endgroup$
    – Mon
    Commented Sep 25 at 5:50
  • $\begingroup$ Some answers below seem to say that it is possible because we can imagine corals that are porous therefore have different buoyancy. Also yeah I am thinking of Genetically Modified Corals and algae and seaweed. The goal being to have floating and moving small islands at different level of depth and on the surface. They would form several symbiotic and endosymbiotic relationships. They could parasitic too the goal is to have a plausible wood like material from those reefs might they be made of corals, algae or seaweed. I am more interested in a good plausibility than anything else. $\endgroup$
    – Kocc-Barma
    Commented Sep 25 at 6:10
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    $\begingroup$ Possibly relevant worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/89602/40408 $\endgroup$
    – Ash
    Commented Sep 25 at 11:10
  • $\begingroup$ @Kocc-Barma Your best bet may be a community even a mini ecology of several different types of sea weed, algae and even salt water tolerant plants up to and including perhaps even species of mangroves whose seeds end part of the growing mats and then rise up out of them to form an over story where even things like ferns and even flowering plants could attach themselves. Your biggest problem however will be storms. Large mats will simply get ripped apart by waves unless there in calm waters. $\endgroup$
    – Mon
    Commented Sep 26 at 3:35
  • $\begingroup$ You probably request something in line of Charon's floating isles' material (SMAC/X game), a something that's floating due to trapped gas within the otherwise hollow structure, both flexible and light enough to survive the surface conditions. Corals as like on Earth won't work directly, but a modified resin tree-based plant life could do. $\endgroup$
    – Vesper
    Commented Sep 26 at 9:18

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Better use a plant than corals as a basis.

Corals are a very specific lifeform (they are animals, not considered being plants, but kind of a hybrid) that is adapted to

  1. stay put on one place (they have a "foot" which anchors them on a certain spot)
  2. Consist of living tissue and produce calcite of dead tissue which form the reefs after long times. Calcite is a mineral, porous and brittle, does not contain cellulose (the stuff wood is made of).
  3. live under water but close to the surface
  4. some can digest planckton or capture little fish etc. Most of them rely on photosynthesis though.
  5. are very vulnerable to changing environment conditions (water temperature, salinity, sunlight, availability of "food" etc.)

Floating corals could mean being captured in currents and have to deal with ever changing environmental conditions. I would argue that these creatures are not a good choice to start to genetically modify them into a essentially totally different species.

From the input given in the description I gather that you actually would like to have those floating islands which happen to provide wood.

As a starting point I would suggest to take a free-floating water plant (in symbiosis with a fungi for example) which either evolved naturally or was the product of some actual gene editing by humans - or some long forgotten experiment in a now submerged bio laboratory that grew and spread in the new water world.

Free-floating plants exist and are called "hydrophytes" (water plants) or "macrophytes" (to distinguish from not being algae). Here is an overview of those used as a pond plant (that is: sweet water). Wikipedia has some thin information about hydrophytes/macrophytes. I didn't check for some which would be able to thrive in salt water. But this is either much easier to be made plausible or maybe your world does not even consist of salt water in high concentrations maybe.

The needed changes would just be forming of a more stable version of the usually soft stems made of cellulose on cellular level. In fact they would form a bark. Maybe to protect against fish which eat them otherwise (also thorns or poison could be a thing) or to attract birds which feces would be excellent fertilizer for them. Their shadow would also attract fishes and other life to hide in and find protection from burning sunlight.

The bark can be elastic like willow rods (withy) and the islands are intertwined and could cover square miles if needed. They could also form the living ground for other animal species (insects) or plants which are even more tree like. Or the floating plant itself evolved a strong, tree-like trunk of which the pollen are ejected to reproduce. The characteristics could be as strong as a classical tree or more like bamboo for example.

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  • $\begingroup$ The thing is that in my worldbuilding, Wood is supposed to be a luxury because it comes from the earth not the sea the use of a wood-like coral/seaweed/algae genetically modified is for the people on the sea to have a material that they can use to build boats and ships. It's an important social dynamic that thenupper classes have access to wood while the lower classes do not have it. it is also important to not that for me plausibilityor suspension of disbelief is measured by the general public not really people who have knowledge on the subject. $\endgroup$
    – Kocc-Barma
    Commented Sep 28 at 22:53
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    $\begingroup$ @Kocc-Barma (1) Well, those details should go into your question text, so new answers can incorporate those. (2) You can play with the plants. Maybe the abundant one only serves withy (which can be bound to bigger bunches which then float and can be the basis of simple boats/canoes/catamarans) and others are more tree like (and allow sawing off durable boards to build real ships) but are a well protected secret by a special elite who grows them in a walled in floating fortress. - Or they were able to bring up soil from the sea ground onto those islands and grow anything on them (scuba, crane). $\endgroup$
    – Antares
    Commented Sep 29 at 2:58
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    $\begingroup$ there is supposed to be two islands and underground cities that are not submerged. That's where the sealings upper classes get acces to wood, fabrics from earth animals rather than fish leather, food from trees... So yeah the access to product from the surface is a very important trait of social dynamic in my world building hence I am making a lot of effort to not have wood on the sea but coral like and algae based product. But your contribution and that of others was good, I think I will incorporate the type of plants you talk about at least to a degree. As a luxury for the lower class $\endgroup$
    – Kocc-Barma
    Commented Sep 30 at 0:29
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As Pumice is a thing it is certainly possible for stone, which is effectively what coral skeletons are, to float. Depending on the buoyancy per cubic metre, the size of the island, and the amount of non-buoyant material that has accumulated on the upper surface, the islands will float higher or lower in the water. Coral is naturally somewhat porous, in the real world these pores are water filled but an altered coral could be engineered to fill them with gas of some sort during growth, once sealed in calcium carbonate leakage won't be an issue.

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  • $\begingroup$ I see, so I guess those island can be made of various type of corals that would have different property similar to material that exist on continents ? But yeah corals seems to be the most obvious choice to make it as believable as possible, suppose. My corals will have a texture similar to wood to wood for building boats; is this plausible for a soft coral to evolve toward that ? they will have endosymbiotic relationship with some algae and seaweed. $\endgroup$
    – Kocc-Barma
    Commented Sep 25 at 6:02
  • $\begingroup$ @Kocc-Barma Natural-ish floating coral would effectively be limestone with tiny gas bubbles all through it keeping it afloat. A wood like soft coral is something new and different, it could be possible but I don't have much to draw on there except maybe mangroves. The issue with wood is that eventually something with that texture/structure will become waterlogged and sink, might take a very long time but it will happen. You can build boats from normal concrete so breaking off and sculpting a piece of buoyant rock would work as well. $\endgroup$
    – Ash
    Commented Sep 25 at 6:02
  • $\begingroup$ Oh I didn't know we can use concrete to make boats. I only knew that wood and metal are the go to material. Sorry don't know if you saw the edit but I was thinking maybe a symbiotic or endosymbiotic relationship between algae, seaweed and corals(soft and hard) for the islands. Also the wood like material doesn't have to be all of the island just a part of it and it doesn't need to have all the property of wood. I am concerned with the property that wood have that makes it a perfect material for building boats. $\endgroup$
    – Kocc-Barma
    Commented Sep 25 at 6:15
  • $\begingroup$ @Kocc-Barma A large enough island can simply have a forest on it it you want wood to be accessible. $\endgroup$
    – Ash
    Commented Sep 25 at 6:17
  • $\begingroup$ The islands shouldn't be too big and they would still be pretty much in contact with sea water constantly and sometimes partially submerged and resurface also in my world, real wood is rare and is a social class marker to have it hence why most people on the sea would use materials like baleen, bones; corals; algae etc for their needs. Real wood is rare and cannot be grown in most places, the sea cover basically everything. So the wood like material is important in the world building and should be subpar to normal wood Also I doubt trees would survive in a complete sea world $\endgroup$
    – Kocc-Barma
    Commented Sep 25 at 6:47
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It's plausible but there is a caveat: coral grows very slowly (the volcanoes on which reefs naturally develop sink at a rate of few cm/century at most) on top of its predecessors, and from the sea level of where they are today to the 8+ km of the peak of mount Everest there is a lot of distance to fill.

A normal growing coral with a relatively sudden flood would have no hope of making it that far: they need a substrate to grow on, they need light and they need good environmental conditions. They can't grow up from the dark and cold bottom of the sea. If you want your story to be believable, you need to match the flood rate with the growth rate of the bioengineered corals.

Floatability is not an issue: proper shaping can make the density of the coral made object lower than water, like it's already done with steel.

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  • $\begingroup$ The flooding will happen in 200 years or so. The corals might take up to 500 years to form those island + the 200 years of flooding. The corals will be modified to be kind of parasitic and form several symbiotic relationship with different organism like plankton, algae, and other sea creatures. So in 700 years they should have started to cover most of the submerged mountain facades and started forming the islands. Will it be plausible to have modified soft corals that would resemble wood ? They might become like that due to an endosymbiotic relationship with algae and seaweed. $\endgroup$
    – Kocc-Barma
    Commented Sep 25 at 5:59
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Corals are killed by other corals growing on top of them. Have them in a sealed cavity and emitting a lighter than air gas as part of their death process.

It wouldn't be wood but it would float. It would be basically be made of thousands of tiny flotation devices.

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    $\begingroup$ I will look into this $\endgroup$
    – Kocc-Barma
    Commented Sep 28 at 22:42

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