by Chris Wayan, 2006
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NAZCA SEAS
This page covers the half-dozen seas west of the Andes and Central America. Eventually the Guatemala Sea and possibly even Lake Panama may get grouped with the Albatross Range, the Clarion Lakes and Clippertonia on their own small page, but for now, you'll find these here too, in a section called THE NORTH.
Remember that the map's colors indicate altitude, not greenery. Worldwide it makes sense to color the lowlands green, for rainforest fills the deepest basins; but the Nazca region's relatively dry--here, warm colors indicating height are often good indicators of forest, while greens indicate drier lowlands--savanna, or even desert.
At first glance, the region looks rugged. The Andes now rise eleven km, nearly 37,000', from the east shore of the Chilean Sea to the summit of Aconcagua. The whole range is a solid wall of ice; behind it, the Altiplano is an unbroken ice sheet, like Tibet. Even the passes are nearly a 30,000' climb (9 km), with temperatures and air pressures as low as at 22,000' (nearly 7 km) on Earth; a handful of mountaineers have crossed, but for practical purposes, east-west travel is blocked from Panama to Scotia.
On the other hand, the Nazca Basin, aside from the former Galapagos and Easter Island (now peaks 5-6 km high) is relatively gentle. I did say "relatively": the rugged Sala-y-Gomez Range has some peaks worthy of the Alps. But the basin doesn't bristle with volcanoes like the western Pacific. Its greatest range, the East Pacific Rift, though actually a faster spreading zone than the famous Atlantic Rift, is less jagged, more like a wall of fused shield volcanoes--long sweeping slopes of ten degrees or less.
The dense air down at sea level (1.5 atmospheres) makes the Nazca Basin hotter than any tropical basin on Earth. But not that much hotter, or wetter: katabatic winds often drop from the Andean icefields, cooling and drying the coast below. Such winds rehydrate on their way across the Nazca Sea, causing fogs worthy of San Francisco on Cape Crusoe and the Nazca Peninsula. But the Amazon Plateau (not just the former Amazon Basin, but the upland from Brazil to Patagonia) heats up in summer, pulling monsoon winds over the mountains, though weaker ones than our South Asian monsoons. These conflicting forces partly cancel out; the Andean coast, four kilometers below ours, is climatically recognizable, though warmer and wetter on average. Conifer forest in southern Chile opens into a Mediterranean belt in the north, then dry monsoon savanna in Peru (instead of our bone-dry Atacama Desert), and monsoon forest in the north off Ecuador and Colombia.
Monsoon forests also cover most of the Quebrada Peninsula, the Mendana and Bauer Sea coasts, and the north end of the Peru Sea.
The rocky hills of Valdivia are more Mediterranean. The coasts are oak woods, thinning inland to meadows and brush, like the slopes of the Merriam Valley above the lakes; the Sala-Y-Gomez Range blocks rain from the Peru Sea. Though not that far south of Quebrada, it's another climatic world.
To the west, Gallego and Rapa Nui along the East Pacific Rise are a patchwork of wood and meadow, deepening to forest on the western heights. This is hot monsoon country, half the year dry, half wet.
Once over the crest, the land drops in a long western slope, to the Agassiz Sea (off map to left)--not just back to sea level but a full kilometer below! The climates of these far slopes diverge more than the shores of the Bauer and Mendana Seas. The northern area, the Gallego Hills, are close enough to the equator to get tropical storms off the Agassiz Sea; but in eastern Rapa Nui, the woods dry and thin as the land drops. Rain here is scarce and evaporation high. Elsewhere in the Pacific Basin this dense air supports equally dense rainforest; but here the prevailing winds come from Nazca, and they've had the rain squeezed out by the East Pacific Rise--Easter Island is a lonely speck on our maps, but it's just the highest peak of a massive range laid bare on Siphonia. So just off the map there may be great deserts, though strange ones--with constant, even heat and strangely mild sun, barely able to raise a tan, let alone burn you!
THE NORTH
To the northwest, over the Cocos Range (up to two miles/3 km high), lies the Guatemala Sea. How much of this huge basin is flooded? I'm not sure. If it filled to the brim and drained through the narrow gap between the west end of the Colón Range and Albatross Ridge, it'd be 1000 meters up, nearly as high as Lake Panama; if so, it'd probably be freshwater. But this basin's further from the equator and cut off from other seas; I doubt it'll rain enough here to sustain such an outflow. So my best guess is a salty Guatemala Sea about 500 m (1600') above the general sea level to the south--a triangular sea perhaps 1000 miles on a side (1600 km), roughly twice the size of the Black Sea. But you could argue plausibly for a smaller, very briny lake filling only the deepest part of the basin, nearly level with the Nazca Sea. Such a lake (marked here with blue dots), would look like an upside-down hat, comprising only the long Middle American Trench and a shallow, island-dotted tongue between Tehuantepec Ridge and Guardian Seamount. It'd be less than a third the size of the sea I've shown. Take your pick! Unless it's a true lake, the sea will swell in the rainy season and shrink in the dry; expect wide mudflats and marshes. Much of the basin, though, is probably rather African-looking savanna dotted with trees, but with true forest only on Cape Tehuantepec, Cape Guardian, Cape Cocos, and the Colón Mountains.
There's doubt about the Guatemala sea itself, but its basin ends clearly and emphatically--Albatross Ridge is an abrupt escarpment over a mile high, knife-thin in its southern half, widening into a plateau in the north. To the west are the complex ranges of Clarion and Clipperton and the lakes of Mathematician Basin--Lake Einstein and Lake Euclid are only two of a dozen or more, in these warm dry basins, looking quite African. Downstream (on far left) sprawl the huge, hot monsoon forests around Clarion Bay. North of the Clarion Range, the woods break up along the coast, and inland the rains often fail entirely; this is the edge of the largest, driest desert on Siphonia, stretching perhaps 2000 km north. Linear oases break the red plains--fracture zones sheltering long rivers and lake-chains, fed by snowmelt from the distant icefields of Mexico and the Sierra Nevada, plus small seasonal streams from the long ridges flanking the fracture zones. Many ridges are high enough to trap scant rain, sustaining open woods; the highest, up to 3700 m (12,000') have dark conifer forests, dusted with snow in winter, while the plains still swelter in 40-degree heat (nearly 100 F).
The following route snakes around Siphonia, covering most features (under construction)
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