PAART | MESOCAMBRIAN | CAMBRIAN | PART 2

IT'S THE CAMBRIAN EXPLOSION!

We finally arrived on what could be considered one of the most exciting turns on a planet's history

Before we get to build our bestiary full of weird ancient creatures, we must recap what happened so far in this world's history.

Paart been through 3,8 billion years of history, from it's formation, to the formation of it's little moon Taaf (which we will present later), to the origin of life in it's early seas, to glaciations, to super continents, and in resume - for the last 350Myr, Paart's been a messy and stormy world, about 20Mya, the super continent of Sthalika began to break apart, and with it's opening seas, came new ways and new habitats for life to explore, without much competition in this promised land, life began to experiment with brand new and exotic forms and lifestyles, starting an explosion of diversity that would be forever recorded in the mud of flooding valleys in the new continents.

Here we see the last genus of Albazoa die out - with the further breaking of cold oceanic currents, while the more versatile and complex Metazoans thrive in the calm and warm waters left after the last hypercane dissipated...

Cambrian Paart, 3850Myo

At the time Sthalika split, Paart's crust was divided in 8 plates, 2 of which were entirely under the Pannotic Ocean, half the mountain ranges from the formation of Sthalika eroded away with the severe Proterozoic weather, the water - previously locked in the Great Northern Ice Cap flooded plains the size of countries creating the Northern Sea and the Voreal Sea, some lakes later joined to ocean to form a complex of mineral rich Mediterranean-like seas as the continents drifted away from each other (Each currently named after what it looks like, because other than that there is currently no great features to call them by).

As said before, the disruption of equatorial and southern oceanic currents crowned the extinction of Albazoa, the so called Pannotic Ocean now formed a Pacific-like system of currents, creating a water hemisphere with occasionally heavy tropical storms, part of why over time, the eastern part of Piscia is getting eroded away.

The high density of nutrients and minerals of the water coming off the new seas aided the formation of hard structures like shells, teeth and carapaces, giving rise to what could be classified as arthropods and mollusks mainly.

A shy general cladogram resuming the last 400 million years for life

Project Paart is an Open World now, so the next chapter in this world's history may take a while to come out
However, you can follow the discussion here
We hope to see you soon!

[Cambrian Fauna]
coming soon!

- M.O. Valent, 02/05/2020

Last Updated, 30/08/2023

PLAN CHANGE ON THE FLY

WHERE ARE THE MAPS? /( °A°)/

Those 306 million years of Paart's history

So, the maps equivalent to Paart's Silurian up to the Carboniferous are gone (I think I deleted them while cleansing used/sketch artwork)... Somehow I lost roughly 300MY of history - climate and climate driven changes in the alien ecosystem are now back to the sketch board, and I decided that instead of poorly draw them back to match the start and end of the gap, I will throw away the second half of the maps I've done and build from the Cambrian up...

So, these maps...

...Are not canon anymore :(

- M.O. Valent, 27/04/2020

PLANETARY MODEL | PART 5 | PLATE TECTONICS IN 10 MINUTES

PLATE MOVEMENT SIMULATION

Last time I wrote about Paart's geography, I came up with this:

Now, I see how messy and hard it can be to get away with plate tectonics - as I had to move, and redraw each new map for the planet, account distortions by latitude and keep track of plate movement to keep it on track - a mess I believe no one may want to go through, myself included gave up on the fourth map of Paart's plate tectonics. I'm not saying you should give up on stuff, but it is rather silly to do certain things manually when you have the appropriate tools lying around.

While looking for solutions for my problem, I had stumbled across a website called Tectonics.js, it's purpose is to reproduce plate tectonics over time, and you can watch it evolve with a random seed, or import a heightmap as a starter for the process to take place. What is great for us, as we can provide a Pangea-analogue map and evolve it over time in a natural looking way - apart from what we would usually do by hand or using fractals, every ocean, every mountain, and coastline has it's own history behind it's shape.

Main page of Tectonics.js

So, I did loaded a map of Paart at age 4,2Gyr old, and watched it evolve over 600 million years - printing the screen every 25 million years - this process took about 10 minutes at 1Myr per second - and this was the result.

According to the simulation, the closest to the next super-continent it will get is 600Myr in the future (frame 21), when most of the landmass is shared by 3 neighboring plates.

Using this evolution of the landmasses, we can track where ancient rain forests lived and determine coal and oil rich points, and by that later determine which future countries or people around the world would be industrial powers due to the availability of those resources, what is a great starter for realistic geopolitics.

Here a + sign mark the place of a certain coal deposit through time:

I have chosen an interval of 420 million years to work with - by that I mean, that Paart's civilization will arise when the planet is roughly 4,62 billion years old.

Then working in 100Myr million year intervals, we get those climates (roughly):

Color code:
Rainforests
Savannas and humid regions
Hot regions, probably deserts
Dry regions
Tundras
Mountains
Ice

Then, most of the landmasses will be on the southern hemisphere of the planet, what makes most of the continents to have similar temperature ranges, it will be an era of greenness and warmth compared to previous eons.

As well, I marked sections of landmass that contained previous rainforests for long periods of time to mark fossil fuel rich places.

RED = OIL

With continental drift tracking, we can as well map the spread of fauna and flora over time, the same way some dinosaur species can be found on both South America and the west coast of Africa, or North America and Europe.

And looking back at our simulation, species from most of continents will have their ancestry either dating back ~50 million years, or as early 400 million years due isolation. What is not so bad, given that Pangea existed for about 340 million years, some creatures from Earth can be traced back to 250 million years ago.

As example, animals and plants from South America, Africa, and Australia had between 150 and 100 million years to diversify once they split apart.

So, our timescales seems reasonable so far...
 

Names in sanskrit based on their shape

I also named the continents for further reference when worldbuilding in the future.

Good modeling for everyone...

- M.O. Valent, 25/02/2020

GEOGRAPHY | PART 1 | ATMOSPHERIC CIRCULATION AND FIRST CLIMATE DRAFT

PURE DESERTS, RAIN FOREST, OR ICY PLANETS? PROBABLY BUT QUITE UNLIKELY...

Hello there, Valent here, lets go down to climate/biome definitions before we make a map of our planet and stuff, and if you already have it, well, it may need some changes in it's climate.

Well, just before we go down to practical stuff, I would recommend a look into Edgar's (Artifexian) material on the topic, so here a list of his videos, not much more than an hour of watching videos and taking notes:

1. Fantasy Maps & Plate Tectonics

2. Ocean Currents: Terrestrial, Waterworld & Tidally Locked Planets

  

3. Atmospheric Circulation: Wind, Weather and Mordor

4. Worldbuilding: How To Design Realistic Climates 1

5. Worldbuilding: How To Design Realistic Climates 2

6. Worldbuilding: Climate Zones Of RETROGRADE Planets

7. Albedo: Mapping with Temperature

Nice, with that in mind, you might already have hand drawn your planet, or digitally made a map, I want to present you with Donjon SciFi World Generator, it creates customized maps and gives you a sample of stats to work with, like planet mass and atmosphere composition, all generated within a seed which could be random, or copied for later recover of the map stats.

The first map of Paart was been generated using Donjon, I will work it forward and backwards in time in order to represent each Era of Paart. So let's start with Paart during the Eoepertonian Period, which came looking like this:

If you haven't saved any of your seeds or stats, don't worry, we can recover much of that using the Image Color Summary, which tells you what are the color proportions in an image, since I haven't saved any stats, I am expecting to get landmass area (orange), icecap cover (white) and ocean area (blue), from it:

Oceans 66,6%

Landmass 23,3%

Icecaps are 10%

This method can be very useful in figuring out how much area a climate covers of our planet, after we color each climate.

Let's first take at look at our planet physical stats:

With a rotational period this long, 22,094h, we can much expect Paart's winds to behave pretty Earth-like, divided in 6 cells.

I also divided the planet's crust into 12 plates, that will be 1,8x as active as Earth's.

Plate Map: 

 

Here a globe gif:

Seems alright to me, so this are the Paartene Winds Cells:

And then, here are the Simplified Currents Map:

 

And now with enhanced relief and currents, ready to work on climates:

Here is the final climate map, as following the videos instructions:

The color purple is a new 'biome' native to Paart, is rocky sterile land of titanium/bismuth and aluminum/ferric compounds.

And here is how it ended up as the final approximation of natural color, note the grey tones of natural rock of titanium carbide in the deserts sand and the blueish shades of green of local vegetation.

 

Based on this rough albedo model, average and medium channels are 66 and 47 respectively, on a scale of 255, it means our values fluctuates roughly between 25,88% and 18,43%, by area ≥37,24% of our planet surface is responsible for directly reflecting light, clouds and land/ice.

By color code, the minimum albedo is  9,4% and max is 55,6%.

Since 18,43 our lowest average, and is 71,21% of 25,88, we could extrapolate a maximum of 33,12 for our albedo, and average Paart's albedo at 25,81%.

Which means Paart reflects ( 25,81 / 29 = 0,89 - 1 = -0,11 ) ~11% less light than Earth does...

Updating climate data for these new conditions:

Paart's average temperature would wander around 38ºC, 311K, or 100F, way hotter than the previous calculations on atmosphere (13ºC).

As such, atmospheric data at Sea Level: 0,948atm, ~38ºC, 37,13 moles per m³, air density 1,083kg/m³.

Composed of 81,34% N²; 16,51% O²; 1,2% Ar; 0,855% CO²; 0,065% CH⁴; 0,023% Other trace gases, an oxidizing atmosphere. Note the greenhouse situation with 36x more methane 2x as much CO² than Earth does.

Given the amount of work this took to accomplish, I consider making maps in 85~120Myr intervals.

Here are some pictures I took with my phone (oof reasons) rendered with PlanetMaker.

Paart's Western Hemisphere

Paart's Eastern Hemisphere

And a little bit of spoiler for what comes next in 38Myr...

 

 Bye, and good modeling ^.<

-M.O. Valent, 18/09/2019

PLANETARY MODEL | PART 1 | BASIC CLIMATE MODEL

CLIMATE MODEL OF YOUR WORLD

Being 4,2Byo, Vol is a main sequence star, bearing 80% the Sun's luminosity and pushing Paart into the mid-HZ.

The planet receives ~72% the light Earth receives from the Sun, what sounds bad 'cuz is a little bit more than what Mars receives and it is pretty cold.

Paart has lots of Titanium, Silicon, Aluminum and Bismuth, combined with Oxygen and Carbon, those can form black rocks of Titanium silicon carbide, Titanium carbide, a black sand made of carbon and titanium, anorthite, a mineral rich in aluminum crystals, and of course Bismite ores.

But that is where enters the magic if physics and chemistry my friend, proportionally, Paart's average temperature should be around 10 degrees Celsius if it had Earth's Atmosphere, but remember the color of the rocks?

They're black, and dark colors absorb light re-irradiating it as heat, at the time, Ozone is not so present and UV and X-ray help warming up the place, with lots of volcanism, even at 4,2Byo Paart has a great balance of greenhouse gas emissions.

Talking about greenhouse effect, the few gases we have proportionally in our atmosphere warm the planet up by ~33 degrees Celsius, without them Earth would be freezing at -18 degrees in average.

Earth at 4,2Byo had a proportion of around ~35% Oxygen to ~65% Nitrogen.

That peak of 35% occurred during the Carboniferous when plant-life over produced Oxygen while consuming the Carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere and volcanic soil.

At the time, Earth average temperature was ~20 degrees Celsius.

Note, our current average temperature is around 15°C.

At the Carboniferous the amount of Carbon dioxide was around  800ppmv, or ~3x times Pre-Industrial Age (~280ppmv), today the average concentration is around ~410ppmv.

Lets assume for a moment that Carbon dioxide is directly related to global temperature, WHICH IS NOT, but we will take that to a future post.

We need ~12,4ppmv per 1°C increase in the global temperature, as taking from -18°C to our global average 15°C.

And then ~80ppmv per ~1,5°C increase to reach the Carboniferous 20°C average at 800ppmv.

(reality shows roughly ~100ppmv per ~1°C).

This change in scale is needed probably due to the atmospheric pressure, when the air can't get any denser in order to increase it's heat transfer capacity, unless you have some serious amount of CO² like Venus.

Anyways, we can consider any value between 400 and 1000 as "Valid" within 10°C margin.

Using this model I poorly made, we can tell a certain range of temperature increase for certain amounts of Carbon dioxide in a Earth-like atmosphere pressure/basic composition.

I don't want to flee much from Earthly standards, remember when I said stromatolites are dead due continental rise? We can say that by this time the Great Oxygenation Event didn't happen in Paart, life went on after the stromatolites died and life on Paart didn't needed to breath oxygen at all, they can use all that available carbon dioxide to obtain the oxygen gas and carbon needed for their metabolism to work nicely, that's why I choose some kind of amphibian-like creature to start, not only because it is the age of the first tetrapods hexapods, but because they can breathe through their skin, releasing some methane and carbonic gas as output of their functions.

Carbon absorbed through respiratory system can easily make up the pearl-looking bismuth oxides, the dark-blue copper compounds in shells of marine animals, scales of armored fishes, teeth and claws of other animals, like some deep sea worms actually have.

In this case, Paart's atmospheric carbon dioxide content may be around 855ppmv.

For now we stick with the average temperatures ranging from 10° to 30°C.

If you plan an earthly biology going around, keep it below 1000ppmv (0,1% atmosphere).

UPDATE

A planet's average temperature relative to Earth is given by:

Where T~Earth = 1 = 255K, L is the luminosity of your star to the power of 1/4 and D is the distance of your planet to the star in AU to the power of 1/2.

In this case, Paart is T~0,899, or about 228K, or -45ºC, what makes sense of a planet without any atmosphere, as said Earth is expected to be at -18ºC without an atmosphere.

But, the formula doesn't take into account, the Greenhouse effect, the more far away from 288K you get, the less reliable it will be, so comes Indiana's Planetary Temperature Calculator.

Using Indiana, the result is around 30°C, pretty close of what we previously established already, hence I would recommend calculating your Greenhouse effect into the amount of carbon you have, at 855ppmv, I consider Paart as having ~2,08x the greenhouse effect than on Earth, hence -15ºC + 2(33ºC) = 51ºC, but Paart only receives as much as 64% sunlight as Earth, then 51ºC*0,64 = 32,64ºC, which is also into the range we defined earlier.

Good modeling, bye :)

- M.O. Valent, 13/05/2019
- M.O. Valent, Updated in 09/09/2019