by Chris Wayan, 2006
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THE RAINS ON PLAINS
ARE AFRICANLY GAINED
Africa has benefited more from the Big Slurp than most of the ex-continents. It averages 4-5 km (13-16,000') above sea level, but the climate isn't nearly as harsh as this altitude might suggest. Climate and air pressure are equivalent to 2200 m (7200') on Earth. Since the plateau straddles the Equator, the result for central Africa is mild springlike weather year-round--rather like parts of Ethiopia.
Both the Sahara and Kalahari/Namib Deserts are much cooler and rainier today--mostly scrub, thin open forest, and farmable prairie below the ice-capped peaks of Atlas, Ahaggar, Air, Tibesti and Marrah in the north, the Namib and Lesotho and Malawi Ranges in the south. This is Siphonia's biggest paradox--how a receding sea could green the deserts. But the atmosphere's retreat into the deep sea-basins has left these uplands much cooler, and the muggy basins generate stronger storms; though only a fraction of the Guinea Basin's torrential rains reach the plateau of the former Sahara, that fraction amounts to half a meter or more (20"). The driest spots deep inland still get at least half that--enough to bring the desert to life.
Africa isn't the only fertile upland on Siphonia, of course. Amazonia is downright lush, and Arafura (a former shallow sea just north of Australia) is now a densely populated upland, as are the Indonesian highlands. But those regions, whether land or sea, were already fertile; Africa's deserts gained the most from the catastrophe. Well, Australia benefited in much the same way.
Of course, not all regions benefit from an altitude boost. Much of East Africa is just too high now--alpine barrens and ice.
THE RAIN DRAINS
In the northeast, the Africa Upland drops savagely, catastrophically, into the sweltering desert and caustic salt lakes of the Red Sea Rift, like an appendectomy scar laid bare. Beyond, the Arabian mountains are snowcapped now; the Jazeera Plain beyond is a cool steppe, wooded along streams and in the north under the Zagros Mountains. Unfortunately for the Rift, most of the region's rivers flow away, toward the Nile or Euphrates, just as they would (or should I say as they wadi?) if their canyons refilled today.
The northern Sahara and Mediterranean coast are forested too, more thickly than the Arabian plain; almost Baltic near the seas. Yes, plural: the Mediterranean Basin is a chain of small seas now, hundreds of meters below below the current coastline. Glacial melt from Siberia fills the Balkhash and Aral Seas, pooling in the swollen freshwater Caspian, which overflows into the brackish but drinkable Black Sea, then the Aegean, then the salty Levantine; swelled by the chilly Adriatic Lakes, the sinuous Sicily River winds around Skerki Bank into the Tyrrhenian Sea, which drains at last down the long slope to the Atlantic Deep via the salt Gibraltar River.
The Gibraltar Falls! Endless cascades, eerily barren banks salt-poisoned by the spray; gaudy bacteria-stained streaks on the rocks and pools. A scenic wonder, but not the friendliest of sights. "Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink." Well, maybe I'm wrong; I'm just calculating in my head, but I get about 5 million km3 of water. The Mediterranean today is a net importer of water--more evaporates than is collected; but the cooler Siphonian seas/lakes will probably be net exporters. So let's postulate a mid-sized river, say, 100 m wide and 5-10 m deep, with a current 5-10 kph--no Amazon, more a Nile or Colorado. That still seems like enough to flush out most of the salt in ninety thousand years. Deep time! But we can't be sure; depends how much the deep strata in the larger seas mix with surface water.
Either way, the Gibraltar River may already be drinkable, if a bit brackish. Salt may still build up from the spray, poisoning trees and staining rocks with halophiles and brine. Or the monsoons of the Atlantic Deep may have washed the salt away; the last tear-stains of Old Earth, before it accepted becoming Siphonia.
DOWNWARD MIGRATION
The wettest parts of Africa's rim, near the drop-off into the Deeps, are cloud forest where upland gorillas may still survive, though their lowland cousins climbed down into the depths and spread around the world. The dense air makes oxygen-hungry brain tissue biologically cheaper to maintain, so the lowlanders have grown much more intelligent; the uplanders are now a relic population in a double sense.
Gorillas weren't the only migrants of course. Many rainforest species migrated downstream to the warm dense damp air of the Angolan Deep, down at the new sea level. The Atlantic basin has more land than all Africa, most of it rainforest. Still, it's not a wide-open frontier down there--African species will have to compete with their long-sundered cousins from Amazonia, some of them intelligent--mega-parrots and giant Amazonian otters, for example.
On the other side of Africa, Madagascar is a huge peninsula now, but ecologically it's still an island. The trough between uplands is so much hotter than ex-continent and ex-island that the two uplands remain biologically pretty distinct. Intelligent life, as usual, is an exception; lemurs took advantage of the vast new rainforests in the Indian Deep. In that rich oxygenated environment they've been quickly catching up with their cousins the great apes. The same phenomenon led in the New World to the evolution of giant, intelligent Amazonian otters.
Africa's population is dense today; mostly human and other apes, with a few settlements of Amazonian otters along western rivers like the Niger and Congo. But the air's just too thin to be comfortable for intelligent fliers like the giant parrots who dominate the Atlantic Deep to the west.
The following route snakes around Siphonia, covering most features (under construction)
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