by Chris Wayan, 2006
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Malaysian Plateau
In our world, this area is a warm shallow sea between Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia. Today its islands are rainforest, but in our Ice Ages, the seabed was a vast plain, wooded and rainy on the coast, but brushy inland. The Siphonian version is in between: a cool wooded upland, still pretty rainy even in this drier world. The plateau's 4 km high (climatically about 2 km or 7200'), dotted with lakes and small seas.
One's not so small: Lake Andaman to the west is as big as our Black Sea. Aside from lower salinity (fresh now, since it drains into the Bengal Ocean) and sea level (about 1 km below its former shoreline) it's surprisingly unchanged from our Andaman Sea. In a world where nearly every climate's changed, Andaman is still a warm, rainy basin--tropical but spared the unearthly heat of the Bengal Coast below.
This region is jagged. As the Indian Ocean tectonic plate slams into Southeast Asia in a slow fender-bender, the collision's built Himalayan-size ranges and then twisted them under the strain. Much of that's hidden in our world; but Siphonia exposes it. The Sumatran and Javan Ranges along the southwest rim of the great plateau are a long chain of volcanic cones as high as 7600 m (25,000'). The south slope is stormy; the dense air at the mountains' feet traps heat, and summer is a brutal succession of typhoons. The ranges are high enough so much of it drops as blizzards (on the equator!): while most snow soon melts, icefields mantle the volcanoes; their flanks are an amazing sequence of microclimates, from alpine meadows through cool rhododendron forest to mild uplands with springlike year-round temperatures to muggy rainforest at their feet.
In the northwest, the low Malaysian Range splits the great plateau into the Thai Valley and the narrower Malacca Valley leading down to Lake Andaman...
To the northeast, the Plateau ends in another great range, the Borneo Mts, culminating in Mt Kinabalu, 8140 m high (26,700'), highest in the region. Its icefields are visible even from the shores of Palawan Sound 150 km away--and 6650 m lower (21,800').
Due north, the Plateau slopes gradually 2 km down to the...
China Sea
Not the East China Sea or the South China Sea; just the China Sea. The shallow northern sea separating Taiwan and Korea from China is now a cool, forested plateau reminiscent of New England or Canada.
What we know as the South China Sea has shrunk to about half-size; what survives is mostly the north. The south is a maze of low, jungly sounds below mild, wooded plateaus--the former Paracel and Spratly Islands.
When the oceans drained away the China Sea was left stranded in its high basin like a tidepool. Some water poured out the Bataan Strait; the sea level dropped 2500 m. As the atmosphere poured down into the suddenly empty abyssal plains, "sea level" pressure (and climate) migrated downward about the same distance; the China Sea climate today is thus a little cooler, but the region has changed less than any other on Siphonia.
Unless you taste the water. Go ahead. It's fresh, isn't it? Rains here are generous, if not quite as torrential as on Earth; the "sea" still spills east into the Philippine Sea, over a sill between Luzon and Taiwan. A freshwater river, not brine; the China Sea is really a huge lake now. Precipitation has freshened the surface layers and the southern sounds, though the cold depths of the northern basin are still salty.
Its shores and islands are heavily human-settled, as on Earth--though with exotic minorities, like Amazonian otters, who do well here. The fliers common in the Philippine Basin to the east are rare here; the relatively thin air makes for heavy going.
To the southeast, Lake Sulu, in the heart of the Philippine Range, is a good 3 km up (4 above the Pacific sea level); it drains into the China Sea. Even larger Lake Celebes just south of it rivals the Sea of Japan as the deepest body of water in the world: over 3 km (10,000') on average; it drains northeast through a serpentine chain of lower lakes to the Philippine Sea.
Sunda Seas
Further southeast lies one of the most complex regions of a complex world, with great lakes/small seas at various altitudes, whose shores range from steamy to cool. The highest peaks, in the Sulawesi and Vogelkop Ranges, rival those of Java...
The hydrology of this region is bewildering, and to some extent still uncertain; the map has arrows showing the most likely drainages, but I may have to revise this extensively, as I discover more about the altitudes of sills between basins.
The cool Makassar Valley just north of the equator, between the former Borneo and Sulawesi: a pleasant coffee-growing sort of climate, like our Ethiopian highlands or Sri Lankan hills.
The Java Plateau, much the same; these uplands will be heavily populated.
Lake Flores/Lake Banda, which hides Weber Trench, nearly four miles deep. Weber may be brackish and stagnant, far below the new freshwater layers. I'm not sure. Probably not--the region's rainy--but that's a lot of deep brine to flush out in a mere 90,000 years.
Lake Ceram and the Molucca Lakes, probably draining north into the Philippine Sea through tortuous lake-valleys, each one a kilometer lower. Sequential Niagaras at the sills? So much water, so many drops... without better maps of the sills, we can't know. But for fun let's assume some are waterfalls, big ones.
The Lake Savu basin to the south, 2 km above the Wharton Sea, has a mild wet climate, with flora and fauna much like old Java or Bali. As with the China Sea Basin, humans here will coexist with gracile elephants and Amazonian otters, with a few eccentric avians from the Wharton.
In the southeast corner of the map is another great plateau, the former Arafura Sea and Gulf of Carpinteria, now an upland called Arafura, where millions of Papuans settled after the air-pressure drop froze their New Guinea highlands. Arafura has much the same climate as the old Papuan highlands, and is far bigger; densely populated farm country.
The following route snakes around Siphonia, covering most features (under construction)
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