Planet climate question

[PlutonianEmpire]

Is it possible for a earthlike planet with ten continents to have neither ice caps nor deserts? I ask because I heard that the sahara and arabian peninsula used to be lush, and because I'm just starting to work on one of my addons again.

[Don. Edwards]

Of course, as long as they are placed in the right latitudes.
The Sahara and Arabian peninsula were verdant and green when the rest of the world was frozen over. That was the last ice age. The climate at that time allowed for heavy rainfall in what is now desert regions. The Earths overall climate was much cooler. So even while those regions lay in dry latitudes it didn't make any difference. As the ice age waned and things heated up those regions returned to be being dry, and they did it in a very short amount of time I might add. From forset and flood plains to totally desiccated desert in just a few thousand years.

If you look at the Earth you can see that there areas of tropical forests that fall in these desert bands around the Earth today. the trick is that they are narrow stretches of land. This allows the moisture from the oceans to keep them wet. And because they are narrow there not going to dry out.

So yes you could have and Earth like planet with 10 continents and have no desert or polar regions. Keep the landmasses narrow and well out of the polar regions and you should be able to create something. Also don't tilt the planet. Give it a very shallow axial tilt. This means the planet is perpetually in spring. The only seasonal variation would come from the planet's orbital eccentricity itself. If its eccentric enough the whole planet can go through the same seasons on a planetary scale as it orbits it's parent star.

One last thing. Keep moons in mind. Without a good size moon or a couple of of them, your planet would wobble and tilt all over the place. There would go all your stability and not having polar and desert regions right out the door.

Another option is make your planet a big moon that orbits a gas giant of one size or another. Just put the parent planet in the habitable zone of the star. This would afford stability, but would lock your day night cycle to the length of its orbit around its parent. Of course you would have one face always locked to the parent planet and you would have a daily cycle of eclipses. But that can be worked out as well given some time to figure all the mechanics.

Don. Edwards

[scaddenp]

Yes, try an atmosphere with about another 400Gt of CO2 into atmosphere or equiv in another GHG.

[bdm]

To eliminate ice caps, don't put land at the poles. Deep oceans at the poles are less likely to freeze over, especially if the polar oceans have a warm current like the Gulf Stream flowing through the polar regions keeping the ocean warm enough to avoid freezing.

[PlutonianEmpire]

Of course, as long as they are placed in the right latitudes.
The Sahara and Arabian peninsula were verdant and green when the rest of the world was frozen over. That was the last ice age. The climate at that time allowed for heavy rainfall in what is now desert regions. The Earths overall climate was much cooler. So even while those regions lay in dry latitudes it didn't make any difference. As the ice age waned and things heated up those regions returned to be being dry, and they did it in a very short amount of time I might add. From forset and flood plains to totally desiccated desert in just a few thousand years.

If you look at the Earth you can see that there areas of tropical forests that fall in these desert bands around the Earth today. the trick is that they are narrow stretches of land. This allows the moisture from the oceans to keep them wet. And because they are narrow there not going to dry out.

So yes you could have and Earth like planet with 10 continents and have no desert or polar regions. Keep the landmasses narrow and well out of the polar regions and you should be able to create something. Also don't tilt the planet. Give it a very shallow axial tilt. This means the planet is perpetually in spring. The only seasonal variation would come from the planet's orbital eccentricity itself. If its eccentric enough the whole planet can go through the same seasons on a planetary scale as it orbits it's parent star.

One last thing. Keep moons in mind. Without a good size moon or a couple of of them, your planet would wobble and tilt all over the place. There would go all your stability and not having polar and desert regions right out the door.

Another option is make your planet a big moon that orbits a gas giant of one size or another. Just put the parent planet in the habitable zone of the star. This would afford stability, but would lock your day night cycle to the length of its orbit around its parent. Of course you would have one face always locked to the parent planet and you would have a daily cycle of eclipses. But that can be worked out as well given some time to figure all the mechanics.

Don. Edwards

Thank you.

Could a sapient species evolve naturally on this world without extraterrestrial interference?

Also, I've heard that placing continents near the equator could cause snowball earth effect?

[Don. Edwards]

PlutonianEmpire,

Do you mean sapient as in homo-sapienes ? or sentient.
If you are looking to people this planet with humans or even something remotely human like, the likelihood of them parallel evolving as we have would probably have to be zero. The only way to get a "sapient" species would be to transplant it there by alien intervention, colonization from earth, or possibly a better way would be seeder ships. It has been hypothesized in some sci-fi novels that a fleet of ships could be built and sent out into the galaxy to seed life from earth. The ships would be run by artificial intelligence and would look for planets with the right conditions and then land near a body of water or ocean. The ship would contain a vast gene bank. Of course we are talking technology quite a ways off from were we are now. These ships would be able to grow in artificial means the various forms of life needed to form a viable ecosystem. The planet would of course have to be deemed lifeless. The planet in question wouldn't even have to be hospitable to human life at this point. It could have a fairly primordial atmosphere and that would just fine. This ship would now start growing the various building blocks to kick start life. Algae would be first along with other single cell animals and bacteria and be introduced to the waters. later as the biomass reaches a stable point higher forms of life could be introduced. It could be added that these first generation life forms are designed to grow and reproduce rapidly and photosynthesize at a much higher than normal rate to speed the process up. As soon as the condition are right higher forms are grown and introduced into the seas. This starts to build a water based ecosystem first, one that alters the waters of the planet to make them habitable but also to transform the atmosphere as well. It would be the ultimate form of terraforming that could be done. As the atmosphere evolved robotic devices would start to tend to the land. Planting mosses and and grasses at first and then moving on to trees. After time nature itself would continue on its own, but always monitored by the ships systems and maintained. Animals would then be intruded at the right time as they were created from the gene bank and grown.
It would no doubt take centuries, but there would come a point in which the ship would start to create its first humans. All of these first humans are genetic clones of people who had lived in the past and donated there genes to the cause. Thees first humans would have to be cared for by some sort of care giver, such as robots or androids of some sort. The would be educated and given specific tasks around the ship. In time as more are brought online a type of human hive system is formed. The first or second generation humans would probably never step foot on the surface of the planet. There main goal would be to learn the ship systems, reproduce naturally and to care and continue to educate the next generation of clones and their offspring. Somewhere around the time of the third generation the ship would inform the humans that it was time for them to start venturing out into their new world. Everything they would need to start building there new way of life could be manufactured by the ships factories with raw materials they could supply from the planet and later out of material that would be growing.
After say a thousand years or so, the ship would long have finished its job, the new humans on this planet would be fully developed culture. How they looked at there history would depend on how there progenitors were taught in the beginning. It could be taken either way of course. A strong sense of mother earth could have been taught to them, or something completely different. These ships could considered the ultimate Noah's arks so to speak.

OK about the climate.
It would depend I guess on the way the continents were laid out and whether there was a great deal of plate tectonics going on; on this planet. If the continents were arranged in such a way, near the equator that allowed warm tropical currents to intrude up into the polar regions than the snowball-earth effect could not happen. Less land near the poles does allow for a stable place for ice to build up permanently. This means the ice would always be afloat at the poles and subject to seasonal melting. It also puts into play that these ice caps cold be rotating because of the warm water currents. There might not even be any icecaps if the water is warm enough. There are many possibilities. As long as you don't make the planet to tectonically active. If you do than the stable system in play will change as the continents move around and start colliding with each other. If the oceans get closed off and the warm currents can't flow to the polar regions all bets are off. You are going to get polar caps a,d any landmass that moves into the polar regions is going to from a platform for the sea ice to anchor too. If this happens the climate changes and you just might get a snowball effect.

So there are only a few ways to do this.
1. Make a planet about the size of Earth, keep the continents small and between the equator and say the what would be the equivalent of the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn on earth. Give it large bodies of deep water that span from the equator to the polar regions. Try and keep the bodies of water as circular or as oval as possible. Circular bodies of water form better currents because of the coriolis effect. This is the effect the planets rotation has and it surface water and atmosphere and making them move through centrifugal force.
2. Make the planet bigger than Earth, but not to big. Cover it with vast deep oceans and only small landmasses around the equatorial regions. You can have all the small islands you want, they wont effect the currents. Also the planet can be as tectonically active as you want. The small size of the continents negates them from having a substantial effect on the water currents. In this scenario you can even have some of these continents in the higher latitudes with out any real effect. Just imagine taking Earth and blowing it up like a balloon and spreading all the continents apart. There come a point were the ocean to landmass ratio gets low enough to were they are impacting ocean circulation much less.

Just a few ideas for you to consider.

Don. Edwards

[PlutonianEmpire]

PlutonianEmpire,

Do you mean sapient as in homo-sapienes ? or sentient.
If you are looking to people this planet with humans or even something remotely human like, the likelihood of them parallel evolving as we have would probably have to be zero. The only way to get a "sapient" species would be to transplant it there by alien intervention, colonization from earth, or possibly a better way would be seeder ships. It has been hypothesized in some sci-fi novels that a fleet of ships could be built and sent out into the galaxy to seed life from earth. The ships would be run by artificial intelligence and would look for planets with the right conditions and then land near a body of water or ocean. The ship would contain a vast gene bank. Of course we are talking technology quite a ways off from were we are now. These ships would be able to grow in artificial means the various forms of life needed to form a viable ecosystem. The planet would of course have to be deemed lifeless. The planet in question wouldn't even have to be hospitable to human life at this point. It could have a fairly primordial atmosphere and that would just fine. This ship would now start growing the various building blocks to kick start life. Algae would be first along with other single cell animals and bacteria and be introduced to the waters. later as the biomass reaches a stable point higher forms of life could be introduced. It could be added that these first generation life forms are designed to grow and reproduce rapidly and photosynthesize at a much higher than normal rate to speed the process up. As soon as the condition are right higher forms are grown and introduced into the seas. This starts to build a water based ecosystem first, one that alters the waters of the planet to make them habitable but also to transform the atmosphere as well. It would be the ultimate form of terraforming that could be done. As the atmosphere evolved robotic devices would start to tend to the land. Planting mosses and and grasses at first and then moving on to trees. After time nature itself would continue on its own, but always monitored by the ships systems and maintained. Animals would then be intruded at the right time as they were created from the gene bank and grown.
It would no doubt take centuries, but there would come a point in which the ship would start to create its first humans. All of these first humans are genetic clones of people who had lived in the past and donated there genes to the cause. Thees first humans would have to be cared for by some sort of care giver, such as robots or androids of some sort. The would be educated and given specific tasks around the ship. In time as more are brought online a type of human hive system is formed. The first or second generation humans would probably never step foot on the surface of the planet. There main goal would be to learn the ship systems, reproduce naturally and to care and continue to educate the next generation of clones and their offspring. Somewhere around the time of the third generation the ship would inform the humans that it was time for them to start venturing out into their new world. Everything they would need to start building there new way of life could be manufactured by the ships factories with raw materials they could supply from the planet and later out of material that would be growing.
After say a thousand years or so, the ship would long have finished its job, the new humans on this planet would be fully developed culture. How they looked at there history would depend on how there progenitors were taught in the beginning. It could be taken either way of course. A strong sense of mother earth could have been taught to them, or something completely different. These ships could considered the ultimate Noah's arks so to speak.

OK about the climate.
It would depend I guess on the way the continents were laid out and whether there was a great deal of plate tectonics going on; on this planet. If the continents were arranged in such a way, near the equator that allowed warm tropical currents to intrude up into the polar regions than the snowball-earth effect could not happen. Less land near the poles does allow for a stable place for ice to build up permanently. This means the ice would always be afloat at the poles and subject to seasonal melting. It also puts into play that these ice caps cold be rotating because of the warm water currents. There might not even be any icecaps if the water is warm enough. There are many possibilities. As long as you don't make the planet to tectonically active. If you do than the stable system in play will change as the continents move around and start colliding with each other. If the oceans get closed off and the warm currents can't flow to the polar regions all bets are off. You are going to get polar caps a,d any landmass that moves into the polar regions is going to from a platform for the sea ice to anchor too. If this happens the climate changes and you just might get a snowball effect.

So there are only a few ways to do this.
1. Make a planet about the size of Earth, keep the continents small and between the equator and say the what would be the equivalent of the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn on earth. Give it large bodies of deep water that span from the equator to the polar regions. Try and keep the bodies of water as circular or as oval as possible. Circular bodies of water form better currents because of the coriolis effect. This is the effect the planets rotation has and it surface water and atmosphere and making them move through centrifugal force.
2. Make the planet bigger than Earth, but not to big. Cover it with vast deep oceans and only small landmasses around the equatorial regions. You can have all the small islands you want, they wont effect the currents. Also the planet can be as tectonically active as you want. The small size of the continents negates them from having a substantial effect on the water currents. In this scenario you can even have some of these continents in the higher latitudes with out any real effect. Just imagine taking Earth and blowing it up like a balloon and spreading all the continents apart. There come a point were the ocean to landmass ratio gets low enough to were they are impacting ocean circulation much less.

Just a few ideas for you to consider.

Don. Edwards

Thank you again.

To be honest, I though sapient and sentient were the same thing. My bad. Ok, the planet wouldn't parallel Earth's biological evolution, but could a larger than earth planet as described in option two evolve sentient life on it's own w/o extraterrestrial interference?

[Don. Edwards]

Well theoretically yes, but there is no way of knowing until we find one.

Don. Edwards

[PlutonianEmpire]

Well theoretically yes, but there is no way of knowing until we find one.

Don. Edwards

Alrighty. Thank you for your help. It is much appreciated!