Alderaan is home to many types of beautiful geography that can be seen throughout its landscape. Alderaan has a Karst landscape from how many hills, poljes, caverns, and is covered in stony barren rock. It has a highland climate, which causes it to be fairly cool throughout the year and snows in the higher elevations. At higher elevations, frost weathering occurs, causing parts of the mountain to fall throughout the region. Part of its landscape is home to many transport limited slopes, causing vegetation to grow a certain way. Finally, Alderaan has two types of plate tectonics, convergence (causes all the folds/hills around Alderaan) and divergence (Caused the people of Alderaan to create a bridge in my first blog). Unfortunately, Alderaan gets destroyed by the Death Star in Episode IV...so we'll never get to see Alderaan's progress over the next 1000 years, but lets say Darth Vader never existed, here is what Alderaan would look like in 10, 100, and 1000 years.
Alderaan in 10 years,
Due to Alderaan's climate, frost weathering will continue to break apart the mountains causing rocks/rock fragments to fall causing elevation changes in both the mountain and the ground. Also, two things will occur regarding Alderaan's rivers. The plate tectonics surrounding Alderaan's rivers are divergent causing one, the sea floor to spread making the river larger over time, and two, making the land surrounding the rivers become smaller as the water is continuously breaking down the land masses surrounding it.
Alderaan in 100 years,
Parts of Alderaan's land forms will be further apart from each other caused from Alderann's divergent plates making the river larger, and possibly causing the sea level to rise from the falling debris from the waves crashing into the banks at any given moment. Also, the bridge will most likely need to be extended from the two land masses moving apart from each other. (Bridge picture below)
Alderaan in 1000 years,
Below is a map of Alderaan, the dark blue indicates where water is located. If my assumptions are correct, with the way Alderaans tectonics move, the bottom left hand land mass you see on the map will might actually begin to split off from one, tectonic divergence, and two, the erosion from the rivers surrounding it. Deposition will continue to erode on banks of the river and will continue to meander over the land causing it to eventually split off with the help of the sea floor spreading from plate tectonics. With this, a new coast line will eventually form as the land mass continues to drift off. Finally, Alderaan's hills will eventually become more larger due to the converging plates, causing elevation changes in certain areas.
When playing any video game, especially with today's technology and high visual graphics in computers/gaming systems, people tend to not even realize the geography and landscape of their video game, Alderaan has a beautiful landscape that was well developed by the programmers. In the future, when playing any video/pc game I'll look more to seeing the beauty of geography behind it... Thanks for reading, its been a wonderful semester!
MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU!!!
Sources: Map of Alderaan- http://tor.zamimg.com/torhead/images/maps/medium/4611686023868513034/map_alderaan_main.jpg
All other pictures were taken by me.
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