INTRODUCTION

Abyssia is an illustration of just how much water Earth has, and what a miracle it is we have any land at all. The recipe for Abyssia is simple:

1. Remove the world's oceans (store safely. You'll need it soon)
2. Now mark the altitude of every point on Earth, and make every depth a height, and every height a depth. Our ocean trenches are now huge mountain ranges; our ranges, trenches. Rugged, isn't it? It's as if you'd turned Earth inside out like a glove...
3. Now pour your stored seawater back into the new seabeds--the Eurasian Sea, the African Sea, the American Seas. But they'll fill up fast. You'll reach the old coastlines with water to spare. Lots to spare. Keep pouring. Soon you'll be refilling the seabeds, and wondering how much land there'll be. Soon you'll be adding "if any." Keep pouring! Don't hold any back.
4. Look for land. Good luck. Most of our abyssal plains, which you'd think would form new continents, have become shallow seas; those that rise above water are low and broken. Only 12% of Earth's surface is land! That's all.

Earth, what a name! Don't make me laugh. Drenchia, Drownia, Uptoyournosia! That's what we live on.

THE BASICS

• Land = 12%; about 2 million sq km of rugged ex-trenches and 58 M sq km of ex-ocean basins.
• Shallow seas = 13%; rich coral reefs cover fully 7% of Abyssia (Earth has just 2%).
• Deep seas: (1-4 km) = 40%: former seabeds! They still are.
• Abyssal plains (5-6 km) = 32% of surface area: former continents and continental shelves
• Trenches (6+ km) = 3% of surface: former mountain ranges plus Tibet and the Altiplano
• Relief above water = mostly low, but with startling exceptions. The highest peak is Mt Challenger in the Mariana Mountains, over 6 km above sea level (20,000'). Greatest depth is the Everest Deep, nearly 14 km. Major features of Abyssia:
  1. Low, broken lands; the sea is always near, and most climates are maritime
  2. Tropical or temperate lands; very little beyond 50 north or 65 south
  3. Narrow, tall, straight coastal ranges, mostly around the Pacific Rim
  4. Plains dotted with deep lakes--the pits of inverted volcanoes
• Cloud cover = Denser. All that extra surface water for the sun to evaporate moisture from...
• Albedo (reflectivity) = unexpectedly Earthlike. Increased clouds make up for less land (deserts and grasslands reflect a lot of sun).
• CO2 = 300 ppm?; the many mountains and trenches suggest active plate tectonics, including vulcanism, a source of CO2.
• Tectonics = active, but don't look too close! While Abyssia's ranges and trenches look superficially plausible, the mid-oceanic ridges and their rift zones don't. Marine geologists would go crazy trying to explain just where those plates are spreading from, and why Abyssia lacks volcanic cones, and what causes all those conical pits. Though some of Venus's coronas pucker inwards; in fact much of Abyssian geography looks Venusian.
• Temperature = perhaps 5 degrees warmer than Earth, on a global average--the equator's about the same but the poles are much warmer. Land climates are maritime, lacking the extremes of our continental interiors.
• Polar ice = only in winter. No large polar lands, and warmer climate; few glaciers.
• Habitats = less diverse than Earth's, on land. The largest on land are tropical forest and temperate forest, mixed savanna (scattered trees, groves, or riverine strips in dry grassland), veldt, alpine vegetation, desert. The shallow seas have larger coral reefs than Earth, but the deep seas are relatively barren; with few deserts, there's less airborne dust, and great sediment-bearing rivers are rare; the seas are nutrient-starved.
• Biomass = 125% of Earth's!
  • Land = 250% of Earth's land biodensity, due to all those lush forests... but the area is small, so the total land biomass is around the same as Earth's.
  • Sea = 120% of our oceanic biodensity; wide, barren deeps offset by much larger coral reefs. In fact, nearly half the oceans' species, individuals, and biomass live in these reefs!
• Intelligent species = most intelligent creatures are marine. See Peoples of Abyssia (don't click yet!)
• Technology = low? The land's so small; is there a big enough base for it? Savanna is rare; did our discovery of fire depend on easy availability? Will fire-use even evolve in such a moist world? And much of Abyssia's intelligent life will center on coral reefs; it's hard to progress technologically without fire or metallurgy, both impractical in the sea.
• Nomenclature: I've used real names for my islands and coral reef zones, with common-sense alterations ("trench" becomes "range", "abyssal plain" becomes "reef" etc). One warning: atlases and maps disagree more on seafloor nomenclature than land names. In fact, they disagree on features and contours, too. Whole mountain ranges appear and disappear with each edition as if by cartographic whim. And why not? They're free to get it wrong--the locals won't complain.

WHY ABYSSIA?

Oh, partly for fun--all the deepest, secretest parts of Earth are suddenly center stage, and all the geography you know is just an oceanographic footnote! Just a little bias-correction for all my land-animal readers (you know who you are).

It was partly a dare, too--my friend Dan saw a sister-planet I was building, Inversia, where up is down and down is up, and he noticed that to preserve the distinctive outlines of the continents, I'd put a lot less water over the inverted land. Dan asked "What if you put ALL our water back, so the only land is our deepest abysses?" It was an interesting challenge, and harder to calculate than I expected (and no, I couldn't run my handy-dandy super-accurate 3-D dataset of Earth with a minus sign to turn it inside out. Done by hand, folks--and that means a margin of error of at LEAST 100 meters! In fact I was off by a whole kilometer at first, setting the coastline near the six-kilometer mark. I even did a quick map of this world: call it Abyssia Six. Catastrophic! Islands dot the sea, but their total area's less than Australia--not much over 1% of the surface. Then I found I'd made a math error and the real contour was around 4900 m. Better, but still blue.) I thought we'd end up with fair-sized continents--basically, all the abyssal plains would become land. Wrong!

Abyssia's my way of highlighting a problem most planetologists don't talk of much. After centuries of highly visible Martian deserts, and decades of Venus-as-Hell propaganda, we tend to think space is dry and other worlds all have drought problems; wonderful Earth has the optimal amount of water for a biosphere. But it's quite possible to have too much water, and frankly, Earth does. 10-20% more water would have changed our geography profoundly; continents would erode into tall, narrow platforms only half as big. Or if our tectonics had been just a bit less active, the relief a bit lower, like Venus... well, if Venus had oceans even two-thirds as deep as Earth's, only 8-10% of the surface would be land! Earth is wet.

I don't go as far as Peter Ward Douglas in "Rare Earth", who claims planets with world-seas and little land won't develop complex life (my world-model Lyr is 95% sea but still sustains a complex land-civilization); but still, experiments like Abyssia show how dangerously close Earth came to lacking land entirely. Only ruggedness saved us: and it arose from very active tectonics, courtesy of the tidal drag of our huge moon. How common is that?

THE LESSONS OF ABYSSIA

In some ways, drier is safer. Even 1% of our water would be enough for very extensive seas, after all; for three examples of dry biospheres, see Serrana (8%), Mars Reborn (1.5%?), or Tharn (0.2%!). Sealife concentrates in the surface layers, and the rain that landlife needs evaporates off the surface, too. Our seas are unnecessarily deep--so deep they were almost fatal.

In short: as we look for life elsewhere, remember: Earth may be precious to us for sentimental reasons, but it's not unique--not even optimal. Just good enough--and yet we're proof that's all life needs. We don't need to look for other Earths; our search can be much broader than that.

The following route snakes around Abyssia, covering all major features (don't bother clicking, no pages yet)

the Lena Is. (brr!) Atlantis -- Sargassia and the Caribbean -- Nazca and Chilea -- Morningtonia -- Agassiz -- South Pacifica -- East Pacifica -- Hawaiian Sea -- Pacifica Desert -- Filipinia -- Vityaz Is -- Tasman Is. -- Diamantina Pen. -- Whartonia -- Chagosia -- Somalia -- Mascarenia -- Crozetia -- Weddellia -- Argenta -- Pernambuco -- Angolia -- Tristania -- Agulhas -- Natalia --

Abyssia's homepage - map - (don't click yet) peoples of Abyssia - (don't click yet) Abyssia's evolution - regional tours - (don't click yet) Gazetteer

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