Athasian Hydrology

Setting
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Ok, this is me rambling again, considering the map. The Big Map, because this only really works if you include the Crimson Savanna, and it helps to have the Curse of Rajaat.

So, if you look at the Tyr Region as it is today, it really sucks as a place to settle; you’ve got a few places with water, and those have big populations, but most of it is a flavor of dry wasteland. If you go a bit north or a bit south of the Tyr Region (really, the Ringing Mountains), you get scrub plains which, while not the best thing ever, are at least better watered than the Tyr Region.

And we know why it’s better watered; the Crimson Savanna has a better water cycle. Rivers flow down to the base of the cliffs, water evaporates, condenses, and comes down as rain. Some of that pushes west, watering the Hinterlands and the Forest Ridge, but the Ringing Mountains prevent it from reaching the Tyr Region.

So why settle the Tyr region like that? Because it used to have water, and it used to have a water cycle tied to the sea. Rivers and lakes (the Dragon’s Bowl might well have been a decent-sized lake at one point) provided a decent hydrology, and the cities were no doubt on such water sources. When defiling dried up the land, so too was water destroyed. This is all basic stuff.

But we get back, as I usually do, to the Cerulean Storm. Because this puts water back into the cycle; if it doesn’t start reversing the further desertification of Athas, it at least significantly slows it, just because of the sheer volume of rain coming down. And while a gallon of water on silt turns into a tiny mud flat, gallon after gallon after gallon is going to, eventually, just make clouds. Natural clouds, made of evaporated water left behind by the Tyr Storms.

I used to live in Houston; I’ve seen my share of hurricanes. But I think this might be part of the future of Athas… while a Tyr Storm is destructive, it’s also localized… it’s Tithian’s breath weapon, a line of destruction hundreds of miles long. A hurricane, though might be hundreds of miles across… Hurricane Sandy, in 2012? It was more than a thousand miles wide. It could have its eye at the Silt Archipelago and still be hitting Tyr at the same time

And the idea of a hurricane hitting the Tyr Region? That’s amazing. Seers waking in a cold sweat for weeks, seeing a wall of water washing over the region, a sense of menace deep within the vision. A type of destruction they’re utterly unprepared for, that they can’t hunker down and get through. Sun-baked bricks melting before wind and rain that might last days. An entire harvest ruined across the Tablelands, not just the Tyr region.

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Sure, but that’s how hurricanes work, right? It’s my understanding that hurricanes form from hot, moist air off the equatorial oceans and begin to lose momentum/power when over land (not enough to stop storm damage, but they’re not picking up what they need to exist over land, so they’re basically burning out when not over water).

That means that you need a large body of water to FORM a hurricane - one bigger than the Sea of Silt (as you pointed out a hurricane could easily SPAN the SoS).

But, i agree that the Tyr-Storms are slightly fixing the Athasian water cycle, even if they’re ravaging whatever they hit.

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Oooooohhhhhhh… the end of the Cerulean Storm. A hurricane across the Tyr Region. That would be a campaign.

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If you go with the idea from City by the Silt Sea that the Sunrise Sea was still water at the end of the Cleansing Wars, then yeah, I think it makes perfect sense that the Tyr Region was a good place to settle then. With the Sunrise Sea as a water source, the region should get decent rain. Depending on what the wind patterns were like then, both sides of the Ringing Mountains may have been forested. The Sunrise Sea isn’t a full ocean, but it’s probably large enough to create a localized maritime effect - it’s comparable to the Caspian Sea which has mountain forests to its south and southeast (the Caspian-Hyrcanian forests).

The Tablelands then, below the mountain forests, may have had a Mediterranean esque climate very favorable to agriculture. The sun had already changed, so it would be warm to hot, but with more moisture then temperature swings would be moderated. (I know it’s questionable as a canon source, but Rise and Fall of a Dragon King suggests a Mediterranean type environment at the time, with two rainy periods - before and after highest sun.) Rivers flowing down from the mountain forests would provide lots of additional water.

But with the Sunrise Sea dried up, the Tablelands are now cut off from both sides - the Ringing Mountains blocking moisture from the east.

I used to think that the Sorcerer-Kings had to settle where they did due to Rajaat’s prison, but actually I don’t think that works. Rajaat was apparently at the Pristine Tower when the Champions confronted him, but the Black Sphere is way over in Ur Draxa. So if Borys/The Dragon could move it from the Pristine Tower to Ur Draxa, he could have moved it somewhere else too. (I guess it was moved twice, actually, since Ur Draxa wasn’t built until Borys got the resources from it from Hamanu as recompense for destroying Yaramuke.)

So it had to have been a desirable location then.

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That could also work with the Tablelands being where the Cleansing Wars started. The Champions would have been at their weakest (level wise) at the start of the war, relying more on their armies and personal might. I seem to recall Rajaat originally had his Champions using defiling sparingly, they were trusted with this extra power because they might need to overcome those who had similar magic and would know when to use it.

Being the first area gives it the least damage, most time to recover, and even though a scattering of races to be cleansed may have returned, they would be relatively isolated by then, containing the damage done by the more powerful Champions by this time in the war. Away from Rajaat and under pressure to complete their tasks, they may have grown more reckless with their magical power. The Sunrise Sea only has a narrow connection to the greater oceans, so it could have been better protected from the intruding silt as well as potentially been the home of numerous silt protection magics that failed after the Dragon Rampage that turned much of the Tablelands to desert.

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While Rise and Fall of a Dragon King is a questionable source, I think it supports that, mostly. Maybe not defiling magic being used sparingly overall, but it sounds to me like the core part of the Tablelands* was “the human heartland” so there were relatively few of the targeted species there, and there was an initial push that was quickly successful in that area (maybe because it was unexpected/the targeted species were unprepared for war), long before he was born.

Hamanu talks about how places in the mountains were ruined during the first push of the Cleansing Wars, but the agricultural areas still seem pretty good during his mortal life. It sounds like the Cleansing Wars themselves didn’t massively ruin the Tablelands - areas were definitely damaged, but not enough to desertify the region overall. And the Sunrise Sea is still water at the end of the Cleansing Wars, when Hamanu kills the last trolls there.

And things sometimes got restored … When Hamanu first takes over Urik, he fights a war with Kalak, and the areas that get defiled are scraped clean and replaced with soil carted in from the mountains.

The overall desertification doesn’t really hit its “tipping point” until the Dragon’s Rampage.

The timeline for the Cleansing Wars that RaFoaDK implies isn’t really compatible with the official timeline, but the rest of it might be.

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