What *have* I got myself in for?
Oct. 25th, 2008 08:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gmtaslashSo, er, this can pretty much 100% be blamed on ineptshieldmaid, who got me thinking. And as you all know, starting Trojie on the path of thinking seriously about fictional things usually ends up with weirdness, because I have no concept of when I am overthinking things, and I get all carried away.
What is Trojie up to this long weekend? She's trying to make a geological map of Narnia ...
Yeah, so, Lewis, like most fantasy authors, just pretty much smacked mountains and rivers wherever the hell he liked. Which is fair enough, and don't get me started on how the hell I'm supposed to do a cross section with no structural data and the certain knowledge that, canonically, there's a magical land of magma and living rubies underneath Narnia, which will play merry hell with subsurface mapping (oh, how I would *love* to get out there with a seismometer and some geophones, or some power gel, and get a seismic line or ten...). But there's not a huge number of ways to get mountains. Either they're volcanoes or they're collisional in some way. I *think* the mountains of Archenland are going to have to be volcanic, I mean, for a start, Mt Pire has three peaks and the easiest way to do that is volcanically, but as to the mountains to the west ... I have this horrible feeling that either I've got a major volcanic arc through the southwest of Narnia, or there's a FREAKING CONTINENT-CONTINENT collisional plate boundary through there, and that idea makes me rear back with a 'Whoa there, Trojie! Let's not get carried away!' I thought I had a sneaky transform fault that could have explained those eastern mountains, and the Frozen Lake marked on the map then could have been a pull-apart basin, but based on today's rereading of Prince Caspian, it appears that from one side of my map to the other couldn't possibly have taken them more than, oh, let's say ten days to walk across, which means all the pretty little mountain symbols are waaaaay out of proportion, and that my bent transform fault would have actually had to have a U bend in it. Which faults don't really do. So bang goes my fun hypothesis. I think I'm just going to have to have two seperate volcanic centres instead.
The north I'm fairly happy with; the map I have doesn't seem to have the mountainous region with Harfang and the giant's City Ruinous in it, which I'm mildly grateful for, but in the north and northwest of Narnia, in a belt including all those little lakes (but not Cauldron Pool), the Beavers' dam, etc etc, I'm pretty happy has to be limestone, and then north of that is some sandstone/other sediments, then maybe another band of limestone ... I'm thinking dipping beds of sediments of varying amounts of induration so that we can get the hilly, rocky topography described up there. The coastal section will be softer sediments, much younger. Some turbidite sequences and some alluvials, maybe a fan deposit or two from all those little rivers. It needs to be soft and young like that because the peninsula Cair Paravel is on becomes an island after only a thousand years or so. And just thinking about a setting like that makes me itch to go mollusc collecting there.
... yes, I am aware that Narnia is fictional. But still! Even fictional countries are built on rock. And rock is something I understand.
ineptshieldmaid, who got me thinking. And as you all know, starting Trojie on the path of thinking seriously about fictional things usually ends up with weirdness, because I have no concept of when I am overthinking things, and I get all carried away.What is Trojie up to this long weekend? She's trying to make a geological map of Narnia ...
Yeah, so, Lewis, like most fantasy authors, just pretty much smacked mountains and rivers wherever the hell he liked. Which is fair enough, and don't get me started on how the hell I'm supposed to do a cross section with no structural data and the certain knowledge that, canonically, there's a magical land of magma and living rubies underneath Narnia, which will play merry hell with subsurface mapping (oh, how I would *love* to get out there with a seismometer and some geophones, or some power gel, and get a seismic line or ten...). But there's not a huge number of ways to get mountains. Either they're volcanoes or they're collisional in some way. I *think* the mountains of Archenland are going to have to be volcanic, I mean, for a start, Mt Pire has three peaks and the easiest way to do that is volcanically, but as to the mountains to the west ... I have this horrible feeling that either I've got a major volcanic arc through the southwest of Narnia, or there's a FREAKING CONTINENT-CONTINENT collisional plate boundary through there, and that idea makes me rear back with a 'Whoa there, Trojie! Let's not get carried away!' I thought I had a sneaky transform fault that could have explained those eastern mountains, and the Frozen Lake marked on the map then could have been a pull-apart basin, but based on today's rereading of Prince Caspian, it appears that from one side of my map to the other couldn't possibly have taken them more than, oh, let's say ten days to walk across, which means all the pretty little mountain symbols are waaaaay out of proportion, and that my bent transform fault would have actually had to have a U bend in it. Which faults don't really do. So bang goes my fun hypothesis. I think I'm just going to have to have two seperate volcanic centres instead.
The north I'm fairly happy with; the map I have doesn't seem to have the mountainous region with Harfang and the giant's City Ruinous in it, which I'm mildly grateful for, but in the north and northwest of Narnia, in a belt including all those little lakes (but not Cauldron Pool), the Beavers' dam, etc etc, I'm pretty happy has to be limestone, and then north of that is some sandstone/other sediments, then maybe another band of limestone ... I'm thinking dipping beds of sediments of varying amounts of induration so that we can get the hilly, rocky topography described up there. The coastal section will be softer sediments, much younger. Some turbidite sequences and some alluvials, maybe a fan deposit or two from all those little rivers. It needs to be soft and young like that because the peninsula Cair Paravel is on becomes an island after only a thousand years or so. And just thinking about a setting like that makes me itch to go mollusc collecting there.
... yes, I am aware that Narnia is fictional. But still! Even fictional countries are built on rock. And rock is something I understand.
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Date: 2008-10-27 08:40 am (UTC)