Inverted Earth

What if Land and Sea were inverted? Well it would be complex and weird for one thing. How would life be? How would oceans work? Challenger Mount? Well we don't know. So we will explain that.
(Note I got this off of http://www.worlddreambank.org/I/INV.HTM)
Let's think this out. We can't just swap dirt and water--the world's three-dimensional. What of lakes above sea level, what of seamounts and reefs? So here's my recipe for Inversia:
* Mark the sealevel carefully.
* Remove all the water. Store safely. We'll need it soon. Some of it.
* Now mark the altitude of every point on Earth and... turn it inside out. Make every depth a height, and every height a depth.
* Now pour seawater into the continental basins until they fill to the old coastline. Since the continents are much, much smaller (and shallower) than Earth's seas (surprised, you ol' land animal? Do you admit to a little dirtocentrism?), you'll have a LOT of water left over. Hang onto it.
* For islands and seamounts and undersea ridges, which are now deep pits and long valleys, use your judgment (and the likely local climate) to decide how deep to fill them: in dry zones, basins with small, salty seas at the bottom make sense, perhaps no bigger than their original coastlines; but in rainy zones, make them true lakes--fill them to the brim! You'll be shocked how big some of these "lakes" are--seas, really, far bigger than the Mediterranean. Be patient--there are thousands of seamounts, invisible to Earth dwellers, that suddenly become deep lake-filled valleys on Inversia. They're vital to the climate, and ecology, and our hopes for intelligent life on these vast raised ocean-beds. Without them, Pacifica for example would be an unbroken desert bigger than all the land on Earth, bigger than the entire surface of Mars. Why desert? Well, it's flanked by high coastal ranges cutting off rain from the Asian, Australian and American Oceans. But Pacifica's plateau IS broken up by the new Hawaiian and Rapa Nui Oceans and thousands of great lakes. Your task is to figure out HOW great. Same goes for Atlantis and Indiana. Their ex-ridges, now great sinuous rifts, will fill to brimming (so yes, there's still an Atlantic! Or at least an Azorean Sea.)
* Speaking of Mars--pour your leftover water on it. Or on Venus. They both need it more than yo
== Judgement Calls ==
Inversia can't be a simple swap of water and land. Paradoxes rise. Picture a deepsea atoll that barely breaks the surface; inverted, it becomes a deep pit in a highland. Obviously it'll fill and become a lake--but how deep, how big? What are the odds it'll fill to exactly match its flyspeck shoreline on Earth? In rainy regions the lake will grow way beyond that, until it spills over; in a dry zone the lake will be smaller (and salty).
In general, I've stuck to the familiar shorelines of continents and large islands--New Zealand, New Guinea. You need some signposts! But I've let smaller islands-become-lakes, like the Hawaiian chain, fill to whatever size and shape seems right for the local rainfall (which of course these inland seas affect! Which came first, the chicken or the egg?)
What of the reverse--Earth lakes? Should they be islands? My conclusion: not all of them. Only where a Terran lakebed dips below sealevel (not easy to determine in most atlases, but I've done my best) did I build islands: see Lakes Superior, Baikal, Tanganyika, etc. This makes the shores of the new Baikal Islands consistent with the offshore terrain; if I honored the Earth shoreline above sea level, we'd get huge, geologically senseless cliffs right at the waterline.
What of lakes or seas BELOW sea level? The Inversian island of Caspia is larger than our Caspian Sea, for that basin is well below Earth's main sea level, the largest such region on Earth; and Caspia's coast follows sea level. The dying Aral Sea makes an equally shrunken Inversian island, but not due to its current drought problems: its bed is shallow, so only the deepest part dips below sea level--making a small island on Inversia.
There are a few Inversian islands where Earth has no water--just a dry valley below sea level, as in Egypt, California, Tunisia, Israel/Jordan, Ethiopia, and Sinkiang. All deserts, of course--elsewhere they'd be lakes. Well, not quite all. I forgot Greenland and Antarctica. On Earth, their hearts are depressed by ice to well below sea level; so Inversia has a Greenland Sea where our coastal mountains lie, but it's a mere moat; inside it is a modest but truly green Greenland. The new Antarctic Ocean also has unexpected land at its heart.
In short, Inversia's a reversal of altitude not water. But even that isn't so simple. I quickly found that supposedly authoritative sources disagreed on even basic seafloor topography! The southeast Pacific was especially hard, for it has not one speck of land; most globes and atlases use it as a place to put their legends and logos; even if they don't, undersea features are sloppily shown. There are plenty of errors on Inversia, but even if your atlas shows me to be wrong... don't trust your atlas too much. Even the detailed maps I finally used (thanks to SF State's map room and the online General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans, GEBCO) firmly disagreed about names, depths, topography, even reefs--as close to land as the region gets. It was a real cartography lesson: wherever they figure no one will look closely or care, even modern maps get sloppy.
I've generally gone with the principle that where there's smoke there's fire: if even one reputable map recorded a reef or trench others lacked, I included it. Where they disagreed (i.e., everywhere!) I made judgment calls. I can't claim great accuracy or even consistency--but then, the whole project is insane, of course.
For comparison, I'm working on a variant Inversia: remove all water, invert, ending with the exact same "dry" topography as Inversia... but then pouring all our Earth's water back onto it. The result? Utterly alien coastlines. The only land is the deepest bits of our oceans--the abysses and trenches. Call it Abyssia. It's hard to calculate the volume of those inverted sea basins, but they're deep. Shocked me just how much high the flood went. Less than half the land area of Earth! Brings home just how much water Earth has. A bit more, and we'd have a world-sea. I've nearly finished Abyssia, but then it has so little land it's quick to map! Paddling in the baby pool until I learn to swim.
In contrast, Inversia has 2.3 times as much land as Earth, over five times as much as Abyssia. I'm roughing in Arctica, Greenland and the American Oceans right now; a few regional tours may soon appear. But this'll be a long, long haul.
== Air Pressure ==
Once we're sure what's land and water, the next step is climate. This gets complicated, for the new, radically different topography changes the air pressure. Nearly all of Earth is near sea level; Tibets are rare and there are no big holes like Hellas on Mars (air pressure twice Mars-normal). But Inversia has small, deep lowlands and huge highlands--many Hellases. Now, you humanities majors will just have to trust me, but this odd topography means air pools and gets dense down in the new basins: air pressure at the new "sea level" is 1.7 times ours! That traps a lot more heat. Our worst-case, apocalyptic predictions of global warming are trivial next to the conditions in these basins--at least10°C (18°F) hotter than comparable latitudes on Earth. Steamy tropics, tropical mid-latitudes, temperate poles..
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Even at 2800 meters above sea level (9,000' up, like the plateau that was our Gulf of Mexico) Inversia's air pressure is like sea level on Earth. The ex-ocean-floors are mostly 4-5 km up (about 3 mi), so they have thinnish mile-high air like Denver or Mexico City (ugh, are ALL high-altitude cities smoggy?) Unlike Earth's modest highlands, Inversia has continent-size regions like the High Plains, Roraima, or Anatolia, and one, northern Pacifica, that's Tibetan... but near as big as Australia. The ex-trenches are now mountains higher than the Himalayas; Mt Mariana rises 11 km/36,000'; but since "sea-level" air is 2.8 km up, the air at Mariana's summit is actually denser than Everest's. Still deadly up there, but only in western Pacifica do any mountains rise into the death zone--the Marianas, the Philippine Mts, the Tonga and Kermadec Ranges. Yet dense-air regions are huge--indeed, continental (by definition--they are our continental platforms).
It almost seems like I gave Earth some extra air as a consolation prize for all that stolen water, to keep life going--artificial life support! But no. I promise. This is an entirely natural result of the peculiar shape of Earth inverted. Planetology: the game of unexpected consequences!
Ecologically, too, Inversia's not an easy riddle. The deep basins are unlike any ecology on Earth today--hotter and wetter than our densest rainforests. That dense air traps heat and transports more moisture. A cloud factory! All that cloudcover shades the basins, keeping temperatures tolerable for life--most places.
But how far can the rain from these steamy, alien basins climb up the huge new continental shelves? Our nearest analogy, the altiplano above the Amazon basin, is dry; but Inversia's air is much denser. This question of rain-transport is vital, for it decides how much of the vast uplands will be desert. How much Carboniferous, how much prairie, how much Mars?
My own projections are undoubtedly wrong. Climatology at this point's an infant science; it's all still educated guessing. But how wrong, where, in what directions? Hot wet basins and cooler drier uplands, these I'm sure about--but the devil's in the details.
== Ecology ==
Is Inversia more or less fertile than Earth? Smaller seas means less rain. Wide inland deserts! But then, much of our deep sea is desert now, judging by its biomass. Sediment and upwelling currents, the two greatest sources of nutrients, are rare in the open sea. Inversia's biological deserts may just be more visible.
And even if Inversia's dry, there's a lot of it. The huge new swiss-cheese world-continent has relatively fertile coasts, and a lot more of them: where our oceans have mid-sea ridges reaching only halfway to the surface, Inversia has a dozen mile-high lakes or seas bigger than the Mediterranean. Even a modest island in our world is just the tip of a much broader platform; on Inversia, this often translates into a huge, deep high-altitude lake. Millions of square kilometers of surface water from these inland seas generate rains that moderate the climate of these wide Inversian uplands. This isn't Pangea, that ancient supercontinent with green coasts but a super-Sahara at its heart. This is something new. Land and water mingle bewilderingly--deserts exist, but they're patchy.
One reason so much of the new land is dry: lots of the new coasts have tall mountains--wherever offshore trenches lay in our world. Such ranges cut off rain to the interior plateaus. Pacifica will especially suffer. Expect wide steppes at best, deserts at worst.
Shallow waters are generally more fertile than deep ones; minerals are more accessible, and most of the biological action's in the sunlit part. Inversia's seas are warm and shallow; they average just 600 m (2000') deep, vast stretches are 100 m or less, and the water's mostly warm, insulated by denser air. Ideal for coral reefs! Even in deeper regions, our river valleys invert into sinuous ridges, forcing currents to wash over them--and as they do, great rolling plumes of sludge approach the surface, feeding plankton. Such ridges are also excellent seedbeds for coral reefs. Even the deeps mostly aren't THAT deep, and are largely coastal--often, on Earth, more fertile than mid-sea deeps. Inversia's land may be heaven or hell, but the seas are unambiguously rich.
== Intellegence ==
Will intelligent life evolve? If so, where, and what kind? Even in our world, with its extinctions and migration barriers, big-brained primates are scattered over a hemisphere--orangutans live in Indonesia. On Inversia, where you can walk around the world, primate niches may actually expand. And not only primates. It's worth remembering that (even restricting ourselves to land animals) elephant brains are as complex as ours, while Arctic wolves have chimp-sized brains, and bears aren't far behind. Parrots and ravens have recently proven to rival apes in intelligence. Inversia, like our present world, will have a rich pool of intelligent creatures, the right environment to shape them, and plenty of time.
Are there any generalizations we can make about the Inversians? Just that they won't be us. And not just superficially so: not just physically and genetically different, but in basic temperament. Aggression, territoriality, sociability, gender differentiation? And subtler traits: the social finesse of bonobos, or the political cunning of chimps, or the shy tool-cleverness of orangutans? And these are just differences in our immediate family! Postulate super-parrots, mini-elephants or amphibious cetaceans and the dominant sense may be not be sight, but smell, touch or hearing. Is the sense of self different in sonar-using species, where soundfields sweep through you all the time, where the state of your stomach is a public affair? Do folks like that even have a word for lying? Or in smell-centered species, where everyone knows whether you're in estrus, will sex be public? Such species differences will shape nonhuman cultures profoundly. Look how we take our tool-dexterity, our intraspecies aggression, our constant sexuality, and our smell-blindness (and consequent ease of lying) for granted! Civilization is not one-size-fits-all.
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Category:Earth
Category:Alternate Universe
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