INTRODUCTION

Abyssia started on a dare. 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--first estimating the volume of water in all our seas (around 1,200,000,000 km³, or 300,000,000 miles³), then pouring it on a strange new topography and estimating how deep it would flood...

COASTLINES AND NAMES

After a lot of calculations (and one big mistake I even mapped, it was so dramatic!), I estimate the new coastline would be about 4900 meters down (a bit over 16,000'). It's not terribly accurate but I can't do much better by hand. I was glad it was close to a round metric number, 5 km; this line at least appears in a few modern maps. No bathymetric world map I've seen HAS gradations as fine as 100 meters, and I wouldn't trust them if they did, given the disagreements between even recent maps with 1-km intervals! Depths more precise than this are just spot soundings (remember, precise doesn't necessarily mean accurate.)

Thus, many of Abyssia's continental coasts are off by 100 meters, though I tried to paint generously to compensate a bit. Areas with fjords are probably pretty close, but the straight coastlines of low plains may be significantly off. Small, lonely islands with steep drop-offs are probably the most accurate, since they're often based on spot soundings.

Even 21st Century bathymetric maps disagreed to a surprising extent, so I'm not too apologetic about my inaccuracies; they're a compromise between half a dozen maps and atlases available in my library and on the Web (mostly paper; Web maps generally weren't detailed enough for my purposes).

It's all rougher than I'd like. Still, the maps are good enough to give you an idea just how small Abyssia's continents would be--proving my central point, that Earth is dangerously wet and drier worlds may actually be a bit better off as life-incubators.

Having found bathymetric maps I could semi-trust, I sketched out compromise coastlines, lakes and mountains in pencil; the example to the right is one of 23 regional sketchmaps. Names are based on local seamounts, trenches, fracture zones and abyssal plains. Some are inevitable, like Atlantis; some involved choice. For example, four plains fuse to form the large continent in the northwest Atlantic, so I could have called it Nares, Sohm, or Hatteras just as legitimately as Sargassia. But none are entirely invented or arbitrary.

RELIEF

The next step was embodying these maps in three dimensions. I got an old globe and cut trenches where all our major mountain ranges are. Next I painted the trenches midnight blue and the ex-continents deep blue, then built up mountains over our trenches with acrylic sculpture gel. The coastlines are thick white paint, the shallows turquoise. These complex coasts took over a month of steady work with a tiny brush and magnifying glasses.

The result surprised me. We tend to think of the abyss as a featureless muddy plain. The truth is that every new sonar sweep reveals more complexity; it's quite rugged down there. The parallel fjordlike bays serrating so many Abyssian coasts are the result of huge fracture zones. The photo below shows Sargassia on the left, Atlantis on the right, with the Atlantic Deep snaking between them. (Spain's in the upper right, the Caribbean in the lower left). Lacy, crazy coasts like these repeat all over Abyssia. Now you see why this step took me weeks!

HOLES

Our sea-floor's peppered with volcanoes, too, far more than anyone expected. These are a bit of an esthetic problem on Abyssia--what's the tectonic explanation for all those conical pits? Abyssian geology would madden any Terran--but it's worth noting the reverse is true, too. Why not an active mantle with a lot of puckers where crust is crunched in a "downdraft", a world with rifts that pull inward instead of spreading? This isn't theoretical: puckers like this can be found on Venus ("inward" coronae), and the hottest convection system of all has lots of them: we call them sunspots. No volcanic cones on the sun!

Abyssia doesn't spew, it just sucks.

Yep, it seems implausible to me, too. Volcanoes really are more common than puckers on Venus, Earth, Mars, Io... But treat it as a given, a necessary consequence of the artistic conceit. Instead of agonizing over their cause, look at their effects: chains of lakes miles deep dot these low, rolling continents. Instead of just a few Lake Baikals and Black Seas and Mediterraneans, they're everywhere. Especially in deserts, they alter local climates and life-zones: our world's shallow lake-basins can easily dry up entirely, but a lake three miles deep isn't so easy to evaporate; it recedes until the surface area fits its limited inflow. Like a gambler with deep pockets, such a pit-lake survives hard times that'll kill shallower rivals. Hence all the lake-chains in the Pacifica Desert, for example (upper left of photo below--the area inland of that huge coastal range. Though of course you can't tell it's desert yet, since I still need to color the land. Man, all that white looks like Snowball Earth from 670 million years ago... Well, Indecisive Earth. Still a lotta blue. Snowball Earth really may have iced over to the equator.)

NEXT: CLIMATE AND COLOR

The next step, determining climates, is a horrendously difficult one on most planets--endless feedback and corrections! But Abyssia is a relatively simple place. No polar lands to speak of; and its scattered, low-lying temperate and tropical lands are mostly maritime and fairly rainy. It'll be a green-and-blue ball, that's already clear. Only huge Pacifica will have large deserts. I won't run out of red or ochre!

As I write this, I'm nearly ready to begin the next step: painting in those forests, savannas and deserts. Another mere month of sore neck and magnifying glasses!

After that, it's a piece of cake. Just...

1. photograph the globe and every region against black velvet
2. tweak the shots to look like satellite photos
3. name everything on an entire planet, respecting oceanographic nomenclature and history
4. make two dozen regional maps (hours each, and the names better be right!)
5. build two dozen regional pages
6. write two dozen tours
7. consider who might live on Abyssia--would apes have evolved at all? Who, then? And how far would they have spread?
8. What would Abyssian culture(s) be like? Different from ours in some fundamental ways?
9. Go back and add THAT layer to the purely geographical tours...
10. Revise Abyssia's map in light of all the changes, then make the regions clickable

Oh, the casualties were almost worth it, just to be able to say that and be telling the exact, literal truth.

Besides, as you can see, I ain't quittin'. I just inserted this new armature of dinged-up, useless bike rims. How recyclish can you get? And the Planetbusters will have a harder time trashing the new Lyr, I think.

A FOOTNOTE: CARTOGRAPHIC LIES

Mapping Abyssia, I ran up against something strange. I needed good atlases and specialized maps for this project; Web maps are adequate for surface and even shallow-water data, but for the abysses, they're just too small-scale and vague--who would want to know the exact countours five kilometers down? So I consulted the best atlases and specialized bathymetric maps in my local libraries, both public and collegiate. As I compared sources, I found big disagreements--the deep sea floor just isn't well known, not even fully sonar-mapped yet. But here and there, I hit anomalies so big I couldn't explain them: an islet called Swain in the far southeast Pacific (not the one in the central Pacific), a large seamount off Buenos Aires, another off Kangaroo Island south of Adelaide, another in the Menard Fracture Zone... Each of them created large bays in Abyssian lands--or not, if they don't exist. And by the time I found my fourth now-you-see-it-now-you-don't mountain, I was getting suspicious. After all, commercial mapmakers lie; they admit it. They invent a village or misspell one name, so their work's identifiable if stolen. Well, what better place to place your lie than in the abyss? Nobody cares, right? Just like all mankind's other junk we dump in the sea, cartographic lies accumulate on the abyssal plain. (Well, it's not just us. That abyssal ooze is gross if you look too close. Shit and corpses.) Who's going to write in to protest--Captain Nemo? Giant squid?

So while I'm confident of the existence of Abyssia's lands, and fairly confident that the coastlines I've shown are at least reasonable, I suspect the maps I have to rely on are lying here and there. Now, my alternate Earths often get me into obscure country, where mapmakers get surprisingly sloppy--and that's part of the fun for me, tracking down the truth using limited resources. A zero budget, for one thing; fairly accurate scientific datasets of Earth and Mars do exist on large CD sets, but I can neither afford them nor run them on my home computer. So I work with what's publicly available for free. That's useful: it highlights the limits of libraries and the Web. I compared a dozen good atlases and bathymetric maps and used the best five; yet I'm still uncertain about some areas where I really should have found clear answers. East of Madagascar, southeast of Kerguelen, the Tasman Sea islands, the Coral Sea reefs, the area around Scott Island, the north coast of Argentia, the Arctic islands... the whole damn planet. Nah, that's just frustration talking.

But I'm certain now that some anomalies weren't sloppiness, but deliberate lies. Just thought you'd like to know, considering how much we rely on roadmaps, and the news, and other profit-oriented purveyors of "facts." Even here, as far as you can get from human concerns and still be on Earth at all, we find the essential human footprint: lies for the protection of profit.

Like cruising to a mid-Pacific atoll a thousand miles from anywhere, and finding trash on the beach, eh?

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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