by Chris Wayan, 2006
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AMAZON PLATEAU
These days, Amazonia is South America--at least, the living parts. All the Andes, the altiplano, and even parts of Roraima and the Brazilian coastal ranges are icecapped or alpine tundra. After the Big Slurp, the Amazon Plateau is over 4 km (13,000+ ft) above sea level--though the Atlantic's not what it used to be, of course.
Amazonia's altitude might suggest it's as harsh as our Tibet or Altiplano, but it's not. The new sea basins are narrow, and filling them takes less air; so air pressure has dropped, but less than you'd think. So climatically the Amazonian basin is like a Terran highland 2200 m up (7200'), not 4000 (13,000'). Since the plateau straddles the Equator, the result is mild springlike weather year-round--rather like parts of our Ethiopia or hill stations in Sri Lanka. Less rain falls, but it's still quite ample for a mixture of forests and farms. In fact, the population's dense, if monotonous: mostly human descendants of Andean people, plus a few Amazonian otters (who prefer the lowlands to the east). The air's just too thin to be comfortable for intelligent fliers, like the megaravens and giant parrots who liven up the cultural mix in the Atlantic Deep to the east.
This isn't the only such fertile upland on Siphonia, but it's the certainly the archetype: central Africa is drier, mostly farmable prairie; Arafura (a former shallow sea just north of Australia) is equally fertile and densely populated but smaller and not a former continent; the Indonesian highlands are mostly fertile but a tangled complex of former lands and seas. But this great forest changed as a unit.
Change does not mean death. The climate suddenly cooled and dried, favoring hill-species and pampas species over the native rainforest trees and animals. But they didn't all die out; the incredibly complex mix of our Amazonia has simplified but not disappeared. And many species that really needed heat and rain still didn't go extinct; like the otters, they just migrated downstream to the warm dense damp air of the Ceara and Pernambuco Deeps, down at the new sea level. "Go east, young tree!" Or at least seeds. In a sense, the whole Amazon rainforest migrated east.
SOUTH AND WEST
To the south of the great Amazon plateau, Paraguay is near-desert, for it lies in the rainshadow of the Brazilian coastal ranges; in the thinner air, most storms don't make it over the mountains. Think Wyoming, and not the mountainous part: endless sagebrush and sparse grass.
Further south, Uruguay and northern Argentina are greener, since the mountains don't block the rains. It's a broad prairie, warm in summer but hard-frozen in winter, with thin dry air year-round. Alberta, Saskatchewan? Close enough. Patagonia's as bad as Northern Canada: cold windy treeless tundra.
But the mountains to the west of all this aren't the modest Rockies (broken mountains with small glaciers, easy to pass--notice it was the unbroken wall of the Sierra Nevada that pioneers starved trying to cross) Both Amazonia and the southern prairies end in the Andes, an ice-wall rising 8-11 km (26,000-37,000'!) above the new sea level. For travel and trade, there are no passes; even the lowest between the equator and Patagonia are glaciated, with thin air comparable to over 6000 m (20,000') on Earth. A worse barrier than our Himalayas. Uplander natives, bred for thin air, can and do occasionally cross the ice to the Pacific; but the new Deep-adapted species would die of anoxia. So Amazonia and Patagonia (culturally and otherwise) look east to the Atlantic basins. To the west, their world simply ends.
The following route snakes around Siphonia, covering most features (under construction)
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