Warkop Climate Analysis

The climate and biome situation in /warkop/ is... not good. It's true that for northern /warkop/, the cold climate is influenced by its high elevation (I operate under the assumption that the yellow colour on the height map is at least 1,000m above sea level, which would put it beyond the tree line if not even the snow line). Still, the issue with /warkop/ is that its elevation decrease coincides with latitude increase, so the two factors would roughly cancel each other out and make the land almost uniformly frigid, with the main exceptions being the western and eastern coast of the country due to their relatively low latitude and elevation.

Still, as it stands, odds are even the most temperate area of /warkop/ will be considered a subarctic climate, meaning the land will be dominated by boreal forest, which can provide a decent amount of wood, peat, and reindeer, but agriculture will be arduous at best. Northern and southern /warkop/, on the other hand, will likely be tundra through and through due to the issues mentioned above, meaning that barring isolated patches of very cold-resistant trees like Siberian larch, the biggest plant that will grow there would be moss and lichen. The situation is slightly less bleak in the south because access to the sea means it is possible to fish and whale for food and some other animal-derived material.

As I said before, though, the fictional nature of this world means that it is probably a better idea to fudge the situation a bit if that would result in a better setting for creation and stories. As shown in picrel, the southern coast of /warkop/ has a warm current flowing through it. While it is likely a rather weak current and its effect would be counteracted by a lack of shelter from the subarctic wind, it can be argued that it can still bring enough warmth to the land to allow for a strip of subarctic climate along the coast to allow for tree growth. It would likely be a mostly seasonal boreal forest dominated by deciduous conifers like the aforementioned larches. The southernmost ones will probably be twisted into tuckamores or banner trees because of their exposure to the polar wind, but more sheltered ones should be upright enough for easy use.

Regardless, barring food import and supernatural elements like magic, hunting and fishing will be vital for most /warkop/ people to survive, as the few plants that could be grown there (mostly berries, maybe some fungi?) will not be enough to support a significant human population.

As for geology, /warkop/ fares better in that a good chunk of its land is orogen, so they will be mineral-rich like other places with active progeny. What is stated in the Western Niji overview should apply to this region fairly well. For southern /warkop/, things are somewhat worse, because its surface rocks will be mostly sedimentary, which does not tend to have a lot of mineral resources - /kr/ is an exception because its sedimentary strata are primarily formed by weathering of old orogens, which does not seem to be the case for /warkop/ (my guess is that it's part of the former continental shelf lifted up by riding the nijiKR plate). The fact that most of the bedrock will likely be encased in permafrost also makes deep mining difficult and probably hazardous, but that is something that can be mitigated by technology.

Throwing people into it might not help that much, though, as mining deep requires expertise that you generally can't coerce out of people, especially when said people can easily cause a cave-in if they want to harm you. In this case, chances are the most valuable thing you can dig up in the south would be peat from the wetland, which could be useful as fertiliser and heating fuel. Bog iron might be present as well, though likely not as abundant due to the long frozen winter, and is much less significant than in, say, /risu/, because of the minerally rich north.

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Pub: 05 Aug 2022 12:59 UTC
Views: 114