ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

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A version of The Land Unknown
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The first one was described in a post on Nov 14, 2018 in the SCIENCE now, add FICTION later forum under the title Beneath Antarctica's Ice, Evidence of Lost Continents!. (<— link)

I had a ball coming up with ideas for a hidden valley in Antarctica, located beneath the ice. To illustrate what I had in mind I whipped up the picture below with Paint.net in, using a nice picture of New Zealand, with the sky replaced by an aerial photo of the North Pole . . . turned upside down







Naturally the bright sunlight is all wrong, but you get the idea.

The thread includes links to articles I found which state that a hidden valley under the Antarctic ice might be possible.

Scientists discover giant trench under Antarctic ice
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The researchers were charting the Ellsworth Subglacial Highlands — an ancient mountain range buried beneath several miles of Antarctic ice — by combining data from satellites and ice-penetrating radar towed behind snowmobiles and onboard small aircraft.
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I didn't create a story to go with this amazing subterranean landscape, I just wanted to see how close I could get to making it seem possible. And I enjoyed every minute of it.

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The article below didn't seem very interesting until I started Thinking Like A Writer, and suddenly the gorgeous photos looked like shots from a movie!

I juiced up the article with a few comments about ideas that came to me. They're the text in blue below.
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Beneath Antarctica's Ice, Intriguing Evidence of Lost Continents

By Stephanie Pappas, Live Science Contributor | November 13, 2018

~ A new map reveals the remnants of ancient continents that lurk beneath Antarctica's ice.

The map shows that East Antarctica is made up of multiple cratons, which are the cores of continents that came before, according to study leader Jörg Ebbing, a geoscientist at Kiel University in Germany.

"This observation leads back to the break-up of the supercontinent Gondwana and the link of Antarctica to the surrounding continents," Ebbing told Live Science. "The findings help reveal fundamental facts about Earth's tectonics and how Antarctica's land and ice sheets interact," he wrote in an email.

By measuring these changes, GOCE provided the data to make a full gravity map of the planet. Ebbing and his team used other satellite data to virtually strip the ice from Antarctica to focus on the bedrock beneath.




Caption: GOCE orbited Earth from 2009 to 2013, mapping gravity differences below to tease out the planet's topography and interior structure.
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Bud: Brother, that sure sounds like the opening scene in a movie about a Lost Word hidden under the ice! We've even got a shot of the special effect showing the spacecraft mapping the hidden area! The only difference between this idea and The Land Unknown is that a shield of ice is keeping the geothermal heat inside, instead of a cloud layer. (Heck, that wouldn't work anyway!)
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They found the evidence of the continent's history as part of Gondwana, a supercontinent made of the modern Southern Hemisphere continents that broke up about 180 million years ago. East Antarctica's crust is thicker than West Antarctica's, at between 25 miles and 37 miles (40 and 60 kilometers) thick, compared with the West's 12 miles and 22 miles (20 and 35 km) thick.

"The East Antarctic crust is also a mishmash of old cratons," Ebbing said, "including the Mawson Craton, which has a matching fragment in southern Australia."
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Bud: Perfect! This Lost Word was part of the supercontenient filled with dinosaurs. In our story, the crust is less than a mile thick in one region, and several mountain peaks thrust up against the underside, serving as pillars to hold up the "ceiling." (Wow, this story just writes itself!)
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"The new data reveals more complexity in East Antarctica's ancient cratons than previously known," Ebbing said. "The modern-day continent is also host to regions called orogens, which are crumpled-up regions where ancient continents would have rammed together to build mountains."
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Bud: Ah-Ha! I knew it! The mountains slowly pushed up the "ice ceiling" and expanded a relatively small area into a much larger one. We'll figure out later how the initial population of dinosaurs and plant life survived in the original area.
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"Another intriguing discovery was a low-density area beneath Marie Byrd Land in West Antarctica. This low-density portion of the upper mantle — the layer of the planet beneath the crust — may be due to an ancient mantle plume," Ebbing and his colleagues wrote Nov. 5 in the journal Scientific Reports. "Mantle plumes are places in the mantle where hot blobs of rock rise like the lumps in a lava lamp. They can sometimes lead to the formation of volcanoes. The Antarctic mantle plume would date back to sometime in the last 66 million years, according to the researchers."
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Bud: Bingo! More geothermal heat than you could shake a stick at. (Put a marshmallow on the end and you could toast it!) Good Lord, I almost feel guilty taking any credit for this idea! This Lost World beneath the ice has been heated by geothermal energy for millions of years, keeping the area habitable.

Now all we have to do is figure out a plausible way of lighting the whole area. Hmmm . . .

We might get away with saying the ice above the region is so remarkable clear that it refracts sunlight down to the land beneath it during the summer months. We might even REALLY stretch credibility by saying that sunlight is gathered across a region on the surface which is larger than the Land Unknown below, and it focuses the sunlight like a magnify glass.

Before you roll your eyes and think, "Oh brother . . . " I'm only suggesting that more light reaches the land below than expected, because the angled sunlight during the summer months falls on the snow covering over a wide area and is focused to some degree on a smaller region below.

If this idea has you thinking warm thoughts about Lost Worlds in Antarctica, here's a somewhat related article.

Huge Lakes Thought to Be Hiding Beneath Antarctica's Ice Seem to Have Vanished
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)