gADARREN: SURFACE

Gadarren, the home planet of the Galen is an unusual planet amongst the fairly normal terrestrial planets of the other federation races, The modern topology still seems to be effected by some massive trauma in the planet’s far past.

Land coverage:

Perhaps the distribution of the land is the most striking feature of Gadarren, where as Earth and Patinar have myriads of continents, Gadarren just has two. Each continent shares a similar topology, but are situated antipodal to each other, so much so that the young Galen culture believed their world to have only one major continent, and the rest of their globe a huge ocean.

Each continent has a central hub, from which many prominences extend radially, a series of mountain ranges ride the spine of each peninsula making the relatively short crossing in terms of distance extremely challenging until modern times. Between these peninsulas are shallow seas, often only a few metres deep in places, there relatively shallow depths have supported fantastically productive marine environments, these waters are often home to giant Sargasso’s effectively floating forests, sometimes with fully fledged trees taller than the sea below them is deep.

Each star-like continent occupies its own hemisphere of the planet, the hub of each only a few degrees off the equator, the sea that divides these two continents has a much different character to the relatively shallow seas, far more resembling Earth’s oceans, often more than many kilometres deep, especially where the strange mutual subduction of plates occurs, forming trenches even more abyssal than Earth’s greatest depths. The higher latitudes support large ice sheets in the manner of Greenland on Earth, the dividing ocean is rarely known to freeze over, though it is often choked with brash ice, which becomes particularly crowded in the seasons where icebergs calve off the polar peninsulas.

Overall Gadarren has a similar distribution of land as Earth, roughly 35% land and 55% ocean, Though the depth of the seas in certain places exposes the land during certain periods of the tide, and the areas that these expanses cover add a fluctuation of upto 3% of the land area.

Geology

Gadarren’s unusual topography is all too apparent when we examine the underlying crustal plates, which also provide some explanation of the observed surface features. Each continent is not made from one plate, but rather a larger number of radial ‘plate shards’ Each looking slightly like a slice of cake. Each Shard’s narrow edge points to the central hub of the continent, and like a sliced cake each continent neatly runs parallel to its neighbour’s edges. The edges of these plates with the associated mountains form the land of the peninsulas and most of the plate itself actually forms the shallow sea’s floor.

Each unit of the continent is actually slowly migrating from the centre of each continent towards the dividing ocean, where it is mutually subducted with an opposing plate from the other continent, this slow conveyor belt progress requires continuous generation of new crust at each plate boundary, which corresponds to the central mountain ranges on the peninsulas. If we consider the tectonics at work on Gadarren as a whole we can think of it as a sort of convectional process, with two plumes of mantle at either side of the globe, and an equatorial sink zone where the crust is reclaimed. This idea so captivated geologists of Gadarren that they hardly considered the idea of planets with any other system of arranging their continents.

This Feature of Gadarren is though to have its roots on the past when a massive collision with a planetesimal shattered the young nascent crust, crudely creating the plate shard system we see today. It seems that this initial trauma started the convectional cycle that seems to dictate current Gadarren tectonics. (It is also interesting to note that Gadarren's magnetic field is almost perpendicular to its spin axis, and exactly matches the continental hubs, recent analysis of interior structure suggests that Gadarren has a very sophisticated geo-dynamo.

The surface geology of Gadarren, disregarding the plate structure is similar to earth, though due to the moving continental shards there are no truly ancient rocks (nothing older than ~1.5 billion years old), however the existing sedimentary rocks (mostly in the shallow oceans) show all the fossil record for Gadarren, suggesting there was no life prior to the collision, or at least life related to the current life through evolution. Because most of the land is formed from the volcanic violence at the edges of the plate shards, the land crust is superbly rich with minerals, far more that Earth’s surface reserves.