#elevation map

ghost in the machine

This third series of maps for @jayrockin​‘s “Runaway to the Stars” project represent the planet their Bugferret alien species calls home, a cold, seasonless world with much of its water held up in immense ice sheets and extensive cave systems.  As such, a great deal of this world’s oceanic crust is exposed to the air, concentrating what little seawater remains at the subduction trenches and other extremely old, low-lying portions of crust.

First, the planet’s plate tectonics, with the plate boundaries defined in white (for divergent boundaries), black (for convergent boundaries), and purple (for transform boundaries) and the directions of drift marked by red arrows, in Equirectangular Projection and Poles-Centered perspective.

The maps below show the planet’s elevation data, first in grayscale with no color gradient applied, in Equirectangular Projection and Poles-Centered perspective;

then with the color gradient applied, also in Equirectangular Projection and Poles-Centered perspective;

and then with the color gradient once again removed but now showing the planet’s liquid water, in Equirectangular Projection only.

The second phase of this commission focused on the planet’s ice sheets and the liquid water hidden beneath it them. First, there’s the raw elevation data for the ice in relation to “sea level” -with no contiguous ocean to define this, it is instead defined as 200 meters above the average continental shelf’s edges, correlating to Earth’s own sea level-, along with a key, in Equirectangular Projection;

then, the same data with a color gradient applied;

and again, this time also showing how many meters of ice sit atop the subglacial bodies of water;

and lastly, the thickness of the ice over land as well as water, first in grayscale;

and then with a color gradient applied.

The thickest point in Earth’s own ice sheets is 4,776 meters deep, just a fraction of the Bugferret planet’s maximum of 18,000 meters between the top of the ice sheet and the trench-sea hidden beneath it.

The map below shows the volcanic activity on this planet. Volcanoes marked in pink have erupted in the past millennium, and those marked in white have erupted in the past 300 years Looking back to the ice-cover map that also shows the subglacial water, you can see how some of those lakes are caused by recent eruptions, as are the few ice-free mountain peaks in the higher latitudes.

Lastly, the third phase of this project mapped out the cave systems, expanded tremendously both by modern Bugferret activity and previous eons of dissolution and upheaval by organisms more comparable to fungi, plants, and burrowing detritivores. The first map below shows all of the major caverns combined into one layer, color-coded by vertical position in relation to the so-called sea level, instead of depth beneath the local surface.

I mapped out these caves in four overlapping layers, here color-coded to represent the tallness of a given chamber.  The first of these layers contains those caves closest to the surface;

a bit further beneath the surface;

further down still;

and the lowest layer of all, with its shallowest caves sitting no less than 8,500 meters beneath their local surface.

All the caves shown here can be accessed from the surface, either directly or in connection to other caves, even if the connecting passages are too narrow to be visible at this resolution. Some of these connections can be fully seen or at least suggested in the cross section below, showing the vertical positions of the caverns beneath a mountain range, or a small slice thereof.

This cross section is shown again with a map that marks its location, and that also includes the ice sheets, subglacial and exposed liquid water, and combined caves.

These maps were all created in Photopea. My reddit post dedicated to this project, wherein you can see the highest resolution versions of these images, is linked here.

A (very quick-and-dirty) elevation map of Ilyccia continent that I'll probably revise once I've got all the symbols drawn in properly. It's all still a bit slapdash, but I'm decently proud of it.

Elevation map of Tennessee in unique colours.