Navalism 4 Wishlist

[Tanthalas]

I could suspend reality enough to go for a 50 foot rise, but 50 meters we are talking about no ice caps or glaciers of any type.

[Borys]

I could suspend reality enough to go for a 50 foot rise, but 50 meters we are talking about no ice caps or glaciers of any type.

Yes. Maybe some mountain glaciers left on Greenland, maybe some winter (multiyear?) ice around the North Pole. The two Northern Passages navigable most of the year.
A small Ice Shield on Antarctica, otherwise tundra. Maybe some taiga/stunted forests in sheltered coastal areas. Most of Antarctica would be under the sea anyway ...
Borys

[Guinness]

Remeber that melting sea ice does not raise sea level. So if we accept that all permanent ice on land melting would result in a 67m rise, than a 50m rise would mean approximately 75% of permanent ice on land will have melted. We can probably assume that more or less the same percentage of floating sea ice will have melted too, just for simplicity.

I'm no geologist, but I imagine that Borys is more or less correct. Also remember we're not talking about area here, we're really talking about volume. The antarctic ice sheet covers 14 million square km today, but is 30 million square km in volume. It might very well end up less thick, but covering proportionally more area, I suppose. Still, ~5 million sq km is a pretty big area.

I imagine that we'd still see some sea ice around Antartica seasonally, and some small amount of permanent sea ice in the Arctic, which would expand quite a bit in winter. The Northwest passage would be navigable in the winter, but there might still be need for an icebreaker her and there, as there often is the year-round navigable northern seas today.

What we get for our trouble is several interesting inland seas, the Caspian connected to the black sea, and interesting river delta system on the north coast of Siberia, and several interesting islands where contiguous coastline used to be. All of these could be useful excuses for increased overall naval production above and beyond what we'd expect in OTL 1885.

[Carthaginian]

I'm actually kind of getting attached to the idea of a 'Gulf of Mississippi.'
A sea level rise seems like a good compromise, even if it means stretching our brains WAY too much to write a new history.

[TexanCowboy]

You know, I read something once that said that the Arctic only formed because of Panama being formed. If Panama was never formed, we wouldn't have ice in the Arctic, and we could have the rise, without the ice melting.

[The Rock Doctor]

Bearing in mind my previous concerns about picking turf before maps/PODs, and other people's stated interests, I've been contemplating these possibilities, depending on what the world actually looked like:

~Mikmaq/Iroquois Confederacy in the Canadian Maritimes/New England area.  Presumes early first contact to allow recovery from diseases.  Possible rivalries with European colonies to the North and South.

~Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth with reformed governance.  Because sometimes one wants to avoid the whole Germany/Russian thing in Eastern Europe.

~Barbary Coast redux, in North Africa.  Probably alternating between raiding neighbours and getting the crap kicked out of them by said neighbours.

~The "WTF" option, which conceptually lies somewhere between modern "bling" culture, the Draka, and Mad Max.  Don't know how such a culture would originate in a pseudo-Earth (though massive sealevel-related displacement might do it), but I would be playing this culture as profoundly awful.

[TexanCowboy]

Well, since Rocky started it....

~Moscovite Empire- Wouldn't be as large as historical Russia, due to failure to explore past Ural's. However, it has most of the technological and economic bases, because most was based there. It would have three fleet's, in order of importance, Black, Baltic, and Northern. Disinterested in Europe west of Germany/whatever's there.

~The western Russia option- Mainly Alaska down to San Francisco. Russia claimed the area, but it rebelled. Has moderate capacity, probebly enough to build a 12,000 ton AC every year, with adaquate escorts.

~The Texas Option- Self-explanitory. Consists of Texas, as it was when it was a nation. Has a small capacity, may be larger, if it has expanded.

[Tanthalas]

I already posted my Idea once but for any that missed it they can view it here Honestly the where dosnt matter, excepting im trying to make whatever migration brought my nation about fairly realistic.

[Carthaginian]

1.) a Native American culture with leavening of European ideas, a lot like what was developing in the Creek Nation before Jackson destroyed it, fighting without to retain their freedom and within to maintain their identity after what elders call 'too much contamination.'
2.) a truly alien culture, based on the Battletech Clans, who believe that battle is their greatest moment and defeat of their sworn enemies (fill in the blank as needed) is their destiny; they are most defined by their rigidly defined societal roles and their equally rigid morals, both derived from an overriding imperative: 'that which makes our society stronger is Good, that which hinders it is Evil.'