Celestia Forums

Well with the Dry Earth and Snowball Earth textures being shown around the forum I thought I would throw in what I have had on the back burner for a while.

An Earth with all the polar caps melted and with a sea level up to nearly 80 meters or more. That?€™s nearly a 240 foot rise in sea level. You can image the result on many of the Earth's major cities.

New York, Washington D.C., London, Venice, Tokyo, just to name a few, all under 240 feet of water or totally flooded.




A rather sobering view of the Earth. One that if things don't change could very well be in the future for the generations to come.

The texture still needs allot work and it is at the 16k level. The pictures above are of a working 8k version for in Celestia testing. The texture takes into account the land masses rebounding from the lack of ice, which also helps to push the water level up as well. The hardest part was finding texture information for dealing with Antarctica. I found a low resolution texture that gave me the push I needed. I will post updates and progress reports here.

As always comments are welcome.

BTW. About 4 or 5 years ago some of us here in the forum wanted to do this but we couldn't find the data needed to do it right. Amazing what a few years and the internet will do.

Don. Edwards

I hope I'm still around for that wonderful day in the far future!

My condolences to the soon-to-die. j/k

Seriously, one of my biggest interest in this is how the new ocean levels will affect rainfall patterns.

Great job!

I like it! Nice. I especially like the thawed Greenland and Antarctica!

I've done a little work with a climatology group over here in England, we've actually been working on rainfall patterns after a massive sea level rise (maybe not as much as this, but...).
The only main thing I can point out is Australia - it'd most likely be far more green. Recent research suggests Australia has two stable states; arid like it is, or covered in dense forests. Theres even plans in the works now to replant lots of the outback and push the tipping point back over the edge as the saying goes, trees create rain creates trees...

Anyway, good job!

This is *very* cool! A small portion of my fictional setting deals with the complete melting of the polar caps... which is what this looks like! Nice to see some hint of what that might actually look like.

...John...

Yes great job Don...glad to see you haven't lost your touch!

New York, Washington D.C., London, Venice, Tokyo, just to name a few, all under 240 feet of water or totally flooded.

Fortunately, Paris will be still here and not flooded
I will be able to see again the Eiffel tower

I want that texture ! NOW !

I will post a few more shots later tonight.

If anyone has some requests of what they want to see just post them.

Don. Edwards

2 things I'm curious about.

1. If the polar ice caps are melted, shouldn't the top of mountains be ice free as well?

2. I was wondering if this would affect the level of the Great Lakes at all.

Don. Edwards wrote:I will post a few more shots later tonight.

If anyone has some requests of what they want to see just post them.

Don. Edwards

Will you be releasing the texture itself at all?

...John...

You have made an error with greenland, the only land in greenland is the outlining moutain range. There is no land in the center.

Don:

WOW!!!! What a remarkable map. I will definitely use it in my Geology and Environmental Science classes, as soon as you make it available.

Thank you for the work and effort.

Frank

Hunter Parasite wrote:You have made an error with greenland, the only land in greenland is the outlining moutain range. There is no land in the center.

Once the land had rebounded from the weight of the ice there would be. There would be the U -shaped mountain range round the edge and a wide, dry, central basin in the middle.

I didn't make the error of Greenland if there is one. The site I got the information from was using data that included the rebounding of the land after the ice is gone. So yes I am missing the ring of mountains or hills at this point, but the land would rebound up. I don't know to what degree but it would be dramatic to say the least. Most of Antarctica is pushed down below sea level right now. So after the ice is gone it is going to rebound up several meters at the least.
I am also short on finding any data that is accurate as to what Greenland looks like under all that ice. I used to have a wall map of the Earth that showed what they thought it looked like but that was 20 years ago and it?€™s long gone. So if anyone knows of where I can find this info let me know.

As for snow on the mountains, I did say this texture was not a finished product. I do plan to deal with some of the snow and ice on the mountains. But some mountains, the highest peaks will still be able to hold onto some of their snow and ice. It?€™s simply the altitude and the temperature there.

I am not sure there would be much of a change in the Great lakes as they drain into rivers. So there level should remain the same. But polar ice melts directly into the oceans so of course the most visible rise would be there.

Dollan,
I will be releasing it when it?€™s done. What you are seeing is simply the result of about 6 hours of work. There are many more hours to go I am afraid. I will most likely be leaving Antarctica looking rather bland and un-detailed. I simply don't have the detailed data to add there. Besides most of it would be fairly flat anyway except for the mountains. I also have some cleaning up of the ocean layer to do. There are some blue artifacts that show up around some of the flooded areas.

I think that covers it for now.

Don. Edwards

Here are some new shots as promised.

North America West Coast.


North America, Eastern Seaboard


South America


Europe and North Africa


India and Asia


Austrailia


Antarctica Austrailian side


Antarctica South American side


And finaly Europe and North Africa with some Clouds (my 16k VT clouds)


Well I need to get back to work on the texture.

Don. Edwards

Those are wonderful Don... I especially like the Europe one. Should you include monster oil slicks emanating from old cities like New York. (just kidding).

Don. Edwards wrote:Most of Antarctica is pushed down below sea level right now. So after the ice is gone it is going to rebound up several meters at the least.

It'd be a darn sight more than several metres... IIRC Scotland's rebounded a few metres just from having the ice over northern britain in the last ice age. Isn't Antarctica under about 8-10 km of ice right now? It's several thousand metres deep anyway. Removing all that ice that's been sitting on top of a continent for that long (it's been frozen up for a few million years hasn't it?) is going to cause some serious isostatic rebound. I'd have thought it'd be dozens, possibly hundreds of metres higher afterwards (given a few hundred thousand years for it to recover anyway).

Don. Edwards wrote:Dollan,
I will be releasing it when it?€™s done. What you are seeing is simply the result of about 6 hours of work. There are many more hours to go I am afraid. I will most likely be leaving Antarctica looking rather bland and un-detailed. I simply don't have the detailed data to add there. Besides most of it would be fairly flat anyway except for the mountains. I also have some cleaning up of the ocean layer to do. There are some blue artifacts that show up around some of the flooded areas.

I think that covers it for now.

Don. Edwards

Definitely something to look forward to!!

...John...

On the issue of the Great Lakes, they wouldnt increase in size from the higher sea levels directly, as they are above sea level, however they would be swelled due to incresed rainfall, and thawing of Canadian permafrost They might even be joined by another two lakes to their west, depending on exactly how hot its gotten...

Well its official, you can blame Apple and iTunes for this project getting put on hold.

After installing iTunes 7 and finding that it didn't work properly on my system I uninstalled it. But it didn't uninstall right for some reason. Sp I backed up my data from my desktop were the master PSD files were located. I moved them to a safe place on my D: drive. I then rolled the system back to before the install of iTunes. After some file manipulating everything seemed fine. So Today I decided to start working on the texture again and found it was not where I put it. So got out my data recovery tools and started hunting for it. Well no such luck. The PSD is gone! I then found out that somehow all my drives were being monitored by System Restore. I never allow this but somehow it got all my drives and it toasted the texture files.

So I have to totally start from scratch on this which I am not looking forward to. I am to say the least very angry that this happened. But I have new climate data to work with thanks to Neethis and I will be altering the texture to show these changes. I still have the 8k TGA and DDS files as well as the specmap, so I might go ahead and clean the 8k texture and ready it for a temporary release.

But for the time being I am going to go through and see what else may have been lost in this system role back and then I think I am going to go back and finish Terraformed Earth next. Then I will restart the Flooded Earth texture.


Don. Edwards