Questions tagged [geology]
For questions about rocks, minerals and the physical structure and substance of the world.
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Movement of magma and the build up of the magnetic fields around the earth. I am not a scientist [closed]
As I understand it the liquid centre of earth (magma) effects the magnetic fields around the earth. I recently read a pice re aurora increased sittings being linked to increase on electrical fields. ...
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Rate at which jackhammer excavates asteroid
I've got a family using a jackhammer to excavate an asteroid habitat they intend to homestead in.
The jackhammer is large, and would normally need mounting on
a column or tripod like this mining ...
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What's the maximum mass for an Iron Planet to have a magnetosphere like Mercury's?
I'm designing an iron planet which migrated into its habitable zone. Basic research told me iron planets cool off too quickly to have a magnetic field, so initially I was looking for ways native life ...
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Reality Check: Meteor Shower buried supermetal in the earth's crust, that is now being mined out
Centuries ago, a localized meteor shower deposited rare "supermetal" in the side of a mountain range. Due to the force of the impact, it created a pockmarked area with the metal at varied ...
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How might the surface of a tectonically active planet appear without a global ocean?
I hope this is "specific" enough, and sorry I don't really know formatting rules yet.
I'm trying to build a habitable desert super-Earth, where water can only exist seasonally around the ...
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What would be considered continents in a world of islands?
The title says it all but i'll go into detail for clarity.
On earth the definition of continents and the line between those and just big islands is relatively clear (let's not get into the Europe, ...
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What could lead a large ocean on a planet's surface to recede completely only to reappear later on in a cyclical process?
I don't just mean tides or large-scale floods and droughts but a premise where one or more large bodies of water (or even every such body if that makes it easier) disappear, only to reappear one or ...
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How would core size affect plate tectonics? [duplicate]
If, for example, the Earth had a larger core (perhaps even Mercury-ratio) what effects would this have? Would continental drift speed up, slow down, or not even happen at all?
Thank you for your time.
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An ocean-planet made out of deadly, non-water chemicals
I'm currently working on a comic-series set in a solar-system that isn't ours, and i'm reworking most of my planets.
One of them, a cold ocean-planet below freezing temperatures that orbits its k-...
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Is it possible for an artesian basin to go underneath a shallow sea while still being freswater?
An artesian basin is an aquifer in which water within permeable rock is kept under pressure between 2 layers of impermeable rock.
I don't know if any artesian basin exists like this in real life, but ...
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Continent Formation and Volcanos
For over a year I've been writing about a fictional race of people that has taken on rather a life of its own. They live on an earth like world with similar geological processes to our own but I don't ...
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What would happen to an Earth-like planet if it had a more magnetically permeable inner core?
I was contemplating the impact of doping an Earth-like planet's core with a substance that alters its magnetic permeability. Specifically, I considered a scenario where the planet has an improved ...
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Possibility and sustainability of Volcanic Climate in Tropical Asia
I am looking for an answer relating to the possibility of very tall volcanoes (maybe as tall as 6km high), scattered around Tropical Asia (Indian Subcontinent and Southeast Asia), that spew lots of ...
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Guidance: How to Create Sensible Plate Tectonics
This is a community-wiki question
Worldbuilding Stack Exchange regularly hosts questions asking either how to establish plate tectonics based on an existing planetary map or to judge the suitability ...
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How many different mines and extraction industries would a colony need in order to be able to produce equipment similar to what we have now?
Help me, you benevolent geology nerd!
This is a question I'm trying to find a workable (but not necessarily precise) answer for a colony-building sci-fi RPG game that I am GMing for some of my friends....
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Do the mountains formed by a divergent boundary form on either coast of the resulting channel, or on the part that has not yet separated?
The lakes and the bay are formed by the rift where the right chunk is diverging away from the main plate. I've put mountains on the land part of the rift a la Ethiopia's Great Rift Valley, but should ...
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What would the geological effects of erosion due to extreme megafauna be like on large timescales?
Whenever I see fictional biospheres with massive or otherwise extreme megafauna capable of significant short-term erosion (such as toppling large rock formations, leveling mountains, digging huge ...
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Where should my tectonic plates be?
This is my map:
It was generated using tectonics.js, and I traced it in GIMP. For a while now, I've been having trouble pinning down just where exactly my tectonic plates should be. I tried sketching ...
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Where, on a geological timescale, would human-worked materials end up?
One day, a race of hyper-advanced aliens are on a stag weekend to Earth, and for a joke they decide to 'tag' every atom of every material that humans have 'worked' through chemical processes (eg ...
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Could You Use Artificial Volcanoes To Create Buildings?
For the purposes of this question the builders are incredibly wealthy, have access to cheap nukes to use for excavation, and everyone in this world is immune to radiation.
The technology is decades ...
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Geology and tidal forces on moon with Earth-life surface, but very unstable underground
I am writing a story set on a mining colony moon with some very odd geological conditions, and while this idea is admittedly likely impossible to fully make geologically plausible but I wanted to see ...
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Would a diamond mountain floating in the mantle cause a supervolcano or lava pool in the crust above it?
I was looking for ways to make gigantic mountains, and found Willk's answer to such a quandary, where a giant diamondberg forms in an ice giant and is incorporated into a terrestrial planet's crust, ...
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If humans were killed out in the Great Oxidation Event, would they leave behind any evidence?
I was thinking about the Great Oxidation Event - how, when they evolved and starting dumping a ton of oxygen into the atmosphere through photosynthesis, they accidentally killed off almost all life on ...
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Methods of releasing nitrogen from martian regolith
One important step in the proposed terraforming Mars would be to give the planet a nitrogen atmosphere.
Now, most assume that nitrogen, (along with water and other luxuries of the sort) would have to ...
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How long is a terraformed mars likely to remain habitable without plate tectonics?
Whilst considering the terraforming Mars in my science fiction project, I realised something rather important: Mars has no plate tectonics.
That means that, assuming the humans in my project manage to ...
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How do I get a giant equatorial continent for my planet?
In my sci-fi universe, I have an earth-sized planet orbiting a K-type star. This planet (which has life) has about 0.6 G of surface gravity, an atmospheric pressure of 0.8 bars, and no continents. ...
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Geological activity and of superearth - cannonball moon system
I understand that this situation is hypothetical -- I just need a piece of advice to make it more realistic.
In my story, there is a superearth of 4,5 Earth masses and 1,35 Earth's radius, rotating ...
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What's stopping other rock layers from creating a karst-like landscape?
Context
I've reread a part of a book about geochemistry and it reminded me that just about any element can dissolve in water if the pH is right. Later an examples of aluminium or iron dissolving en ...
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How would about a dozen 50 ft to 1,400 ft (approx. 15 m to 430 m) giants wandering around a continent affect seismic activity?
8 of the giants would be around 50-100 ft (15-30 m) and only one would be 1,400 ft (430 m), the other three would be about 500-800 ft (152-243 m). Let's say that they are somehow remarkably light for ...
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How could an iron planet be geologically active?
So I have an iron planet, and its name is Randall.
Since Randall is an iron planet, he is basically the core of a planet with no crust/mantle, and very few silicates. Now, I, the creator outside of ...
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What is the maximum amount of land (percentage-wise) a habitable planet can have?
Earth is our only example of a habitable planet. The surface of Earth is 29% land and 71% ocean. I am wondering what other land ratios can create a habitable planet.
Half a billion years ago, Earth ...
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Turning possible a gigantic rock in the sky (sci-fi and magic)
Ok, we have magic to solve all my problems but I want to find if I can solve this "the most cientific possible".
I have a world that turns out to be the earth but in a post-apocalyptic ...
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How large of a magma chamber do I need to geothermally power a small city?
I have a fictional civilization that lives on a continent (or world) with a perpetually cold, wintry climate. The continent does have a large number of volcanoes of varying sizes and levels of ...
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What biomes would Atlantis (mythical land in the Atlantic Ocean) have? [closed]
Atlantis is a mythical continent from Plato's writings. It was an advanced island that rivaled Athens. It lost favor with the Greek gods and as a result it fell beneath the waves.
Neat story but I'm ...
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What would happen if Olympus mons erupted?
The Tharsis range is a quartet of immense volcanoes on Mars, one of which, Olympus Mons, is largest in the solar system. It is so vast that it cannot be seen from the surface; should you stand it’s ...
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On an Earth-like planet, what geologic features would contain which important minerals (such as gold, iron, copper)? [closed]
I'm writing a book that's set on a planet very similar to earth, meaning it has all the same gravity, mineral compositions, and geologic features. With that in mind:
What geological features are the ...
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What biomes would Gondwana, a supercontinent consisting of South America and Africa have?
Hundreds of millions of years ago, there was a supercontinent named Pangaea that had almost every landmass on Earth. Later on, that landmass drifted apart into continents. It first became smaller ...
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Alcohol from the ground
I remember reading about ethanol that's able to be found trapped within rocks, but I sincerely cannot find the source, so here I am.
I'm trying to understand how that works. I want to magnify it in my ...
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What climate would Kumari Kandam have (a mythical continent on the Indian Ocean)?
Kumari Kandam was another mythical continent. It was believed to be host to an ancient Tamil civilization. Such a land was mentioned in ancient Tamil writings. Europeans picked up on the idea to ...
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Building materials for a palace or castle on a volcanic island?
I have a magical setting I am working on in my world that is based on a large volcanic island that has been created by a sunken, fantastically large caldera. Up to this point, my story has centered ...
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Under what conditions could a gold planet form?
So, I am imagining a draconic alien species which, (don’t laugh) inhabit a planetary system that is particularly rich in heavy elements such as platinum, silver, and yes, gold. (I said don’t laugh!) ...
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How would the coastlines of a chemical sea on a planet with extreme winds form?
On one of my pet projects, there is a chemical sea similar to the Black Sea if it had the saline content of Lake Natron; extreme density of chemicals in the soil and from vents. It's about the size of ...
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What would happen to enormous indestructible ruins after 400 million years? [closed]
Suppose you had ruins (and I use the term lightly) that could survive nearly any disaster and any erosion. How likely are they to be buried, subsumed into the mantle, or end up at the bottom of the ...
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Extreme winds creating windy canyons
On a planet I've been working on that has extreme wind conditions, coastal zephyrs cross through mountains and get split into stream-like avenues that carve deep gouges in the rainshadowed valley ...
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What metal or mineral commonly found on Earth could be extremely rare on a different Earth-like planet?
I am writing a story where a secret organization in the present day controls a portal between Earth and a different Earth-like planet. The organization secretly ships resources between planets to make ...
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How to tunnel to a planet’s core
One of the main problems with creating a magnetic field around Mars, (which would be necessary for terraforming the planet) is that most proposed systems require some artificial device to sustain it. (...
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Can I Have a Semi-Liquid "Sea" of Sand?
I am thinking of adding an element to my world that is primarily desert that consists of a semi liquid sea of possibly high silica sand that's inundated with salt water. Would such a mixture have the ...
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Can my planet be gradually eroded by solar wind over 6 billion years?
The planet is a barren rocky dwarf planet which orbits at 0.05 AU from its star of 0.9 solar masses, at 6 billion years old. Because of this, it’s surface is melting and evaporating, forming a thin ...
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How could someone induce a cave-in quickly in a medieval-ish setting?
The idea here is that a commander of an army intentionally caves in a cave for a tactical benefit, and this needs to happen quickly. The best ideas i had were either explosives (obvious, but maybe ...
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Food chain based in geothermal heat?
Underground dwarven (and other) civilizations are a staple of fantasy worlds. The obvious question (what do these people eat?) is rarely answered.
As an explanation, I considered a food chain based in ...
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