by Chris Wayan, 2006
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PACIFIC OCEAN
This is just a crude preliminary sketch of the eventual map. The northern Pacific basin is one of the harder regions to depict, for it's by far the deepest sea on Earth, and the ruggedest basin--hundreds of seamounts and islands rise as tall as Ararat or Kilimanjaro, only to be lopped off by erosion at the surface.
On Siphonia this violently vertical world is bared.
The most obvious feature is the Z-shaped small continent in the center of the Pacific: the upper ridge is the Hawaiian chain; the lower, the Mid-Pacific Seamount Chain and the Line Islands; narrow Necker Ridge links them. To the north are lower but Japan-sized islands. The eastern basin is relatively flat, broken by long straight ridges and canyons; the west, a vast archipelago of tall volcanic islands, ending in deep trenches and the great mountain wall of Japan, as high as our Himalaya.
The Pacific lies a kilometer below the other seas, and air pressure is 1.7 atmospheres. Heated by its dense air, the basin is steamy, the hottest place on Siphonia. Even the northern edge, below the snowy Aleutian Mountains, is balmy, but on the equator, the mean noon temperature is 40 C (104 F) and can range up past 50 (122).
Did I mention the humidity is close to 100%?
We'd find it an alien world--lush, beautiful, but unfriendly. All that hot air rising creates huge storms. Summer especially sees nonstop rains and fierce winds--rarely over 160 kph / 100 mph, but the dense air gives that a double punch. Huge rainforests cover these shores, but every trunk is buttressed and every leaf is lace.
Animal life is mostly winged--not just birds but mammals and reptiles too. It's just so much easier when the air's that thick; smaller wings can support an animal's weight, and the maximum practical flight-weight is 25-30 kg (about 60 lbs), not 15 / 35 as on Earth. That has consequences for intelligent life...
LIFE IN THE PACIFIC DEEP
The Pacific is one of only two seas fully 5 km below the old sea level. Beside trapping heat, the high air pressure makes flight easy. Even large animals glide on skin flaps from tree to tree, and many fly.
Including the people. No, not humans. In the south at least, it's too hot for them: often 50 C (122 F) and 100% humidity! The dominant species here will be giant parrots. Even our parrots are as bright as chimps, though it took until this decade for the evidence to finally overcome mammalian scientific prejudices. And they manage it with brains weighing only ounces. Bird brains (despite human insults) beat mammal brains for efficiency--by a wide margin!
But the dense air of the Pacific Deep supports much bigger fliers. Most parrots are no more than 10 kg, but that's quite large enough for them to have brainweights of 5-600 grams--well over a pound. They're just as intelligent as a human--perhaps more so. These megaparrots are imposing creatures in other ways as well: brilliantly colored, with much deeper (but still piercing) voices, and wingspans up to 4 meters (13').
Equally imposing are their distant cousins: megaravens. They're even less recognizable, for in these hot basins, black feathers were a sun-absorbing disadvantage; as they grew, they lightened in color, ending up looking more like their close cousins the jays: various mixtures of gray, blue and white. But they're unmistakable: huge heads, rich but hoarse voices, the playfulness tinged with a dark irony... really, they haven't changed a bit. A useful tonic to anyone grown tired of parrots' loud good cheer (punctuated by equally loud prima-donna tantrums).
But fliers aren't the only creatures who have grown larger, with startling consequences for brain size. For an example I'll use the species you're most likely to meet here in the Pacific: a newly evolved people who cope with the heat and humidity in a different way, by hardly coming out of the water, in the day at least. You see them in every port and river town: big wet furry things chirping at you and wiggling their whiskers. They're descendants of giant freshwater Amazonian otters, of course.
Their quick evolution was one of those unpredictable consequences of radical environmental change. Recent studies show that the size of animals and the number of species (and probably total biomass, too) correlate well with the oxygen content of the air. Earth's atmosphere has varied greatly over its history--in the last billion years alone, it's varied from 13 to 30% oxygen! While the percentage of oxygen on Siphonia isn't much higher than on our Earth, the dense rainforests in the deepest basins like the Pacific have pushed it higher, to 21 or 22%. However, that's merely the percentage. Down in these deep basins, the available oxygen is 70-80% higher--a bigger change than animal life has seen since brains evolved! All that extra oxygen makes it much easier for an animal to grow larger--OR to grow larger specialized, oxygen-hungry organs. Like brains! They're the costliest organ of all, pound for pound--hogs for both calories and oxygen. In an environment where food isn't too hard to get--and these lush coasts qualify--it turns out that supercharged air has freed many nonflying species to grow much larger and more intelligent. Amazonian otters, already big and bright, apparently crossed a crucial threshhold: social intelligence, the ability to understand, predict, and influence other creatures' behavior, became more important as they got less predictable. A spiral of brain-growth ensued, rather quickly tripling brain-size... just as it had in humans and dolphins.
Other than scaling up, they haven't changed much, physically. The main adaptation is to heat: they're gracile, that is, slenderer, with longer limbs. More surface area per pound means a cooler otter: more evaporative heat dispersal when they're on land.
While human intervention was essential in their appearance here, humans didn't breed or genetically engineer them--just gave them ship-passage from the Atlantic Ocean, and the promise of dockside and fishing jobs! Their descendants naturalized, and are found all over the warmer parts of the Pacific basin, especially the south. Though these otters are adaptable; some are now found along the Aleutian coast, and even the Bering Sea above 50 north. It's much warmer than our world would be, of course--air that dense guarantees it never snows, not at 50, and rarely at 60--but they've a long way from muddy tributaries of the equatorial Amazon.
Of course, mentally they've come further still; from animals to people in a geological blink.
The following route snakes around Siphonia, covering most features (under construction)
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