The Southerners' problem

[Calderis]

In BoM we are shown that the Southern Scadrians have a problem that makes the brass medallions a necessity for their survival. They are shown to freeze to death in what appears to be relatively mild weather in the memory that Wax views at the end of the book. 

I've long suspected the reason for this, but through a recent discord discussion with @Extesian and @Spoolofwhool I think we've nailed down the actual mechanism.

The Southerners were set aside by Rashek when he changed scadrial to preserve the original genetics of Scadrians in case his experiments in the north with the Nobles and Skaa went horribly wrong. We have a WoB, though, that he found a way to allow them to survive the heat created by moving the planet. Without the Ashmounts, or the altered genetics required from all of his cascading problems in the north. 

Quote

Comatose

So here's my last question. If there ARE people on the other side of the world, did Vin kill them all by placing the sun on their side, or do they have they're own Ruin/Preservation battle going on over there as well? Do they also have allomancy feruchemy and hemalurgy?

Brandon Sanderson

No, they're not dead. Yes, Rashek was aware of them. In fact, he placed them there as a reserve. I knew he wanted a 'control' group of people in case his changes to genetics ended with the race being in serious trouble. All I'll say is that he found a way other than changing them genetically to help them survive in the world he created. And since they were created by Ruin and Preservation, they have the seeds of the Three Metallic Arts in them—though without anyone among them having burned Lerasium, Allomancers would have been very rare in their population and full Mistborn unheard of.

Hero of Ages Q&A - Time Waster's Guide (Oct. 15, 2008)

I believe that the method he found was a purely Spiritual alteration. 

I believe that Rashek altered the Spiritual aspect of the Southerners in a way that mimics storing in brass via Feruchemy. Storing would allow a person to survive extreme temperatures by making themselves colder. 

Quote

Thoughtful Spurts

If tapping heat means your own body gets hotter, does it also mean you become immune to hot temperatures so long as you're tapping it, or should you fill heat and grow colder for that to happen?

Brandon Sanderson

As everything in Feruchemy, you become immune to the effects of the ability only. Like weight doesn't crush you, but at the same time doesn't have a net gain in strength. Growing colder, however, would be more helpful in this regard.

17th Shard Forum Q&A (Sept. 26, 2012)

So I think that the problem that they suffer from, and why they specifically need Brass Feruchemy to compensate, is that there Spiritual Aspects have been altered in a way that causes the body heat that would normally be produced to essentially "store" continually, dumping body heat into the Spiritual as Investiture to make them function at a far colder level than is natural. Which, while the world was uninhabitably hot was a boon to their survival, but now leaves them perpetually on the verge of hypothermia.

Genetic information preserved, still able to survive in temperatures that should have quickly lead to heat stroke and death... And a major problem with no physical source once the planet was returned to its proper orbit. 

It still doesn't answer why Sazed didn't fix them for me, but it is a mechanism that seems to make sense. 

[Karger]

If this is true then if they get close to a perpendicularity does the air around them heat up? 

Edited May 29, 2019 by Karger

[+Ed Venture]

53 minutes ago, Karger said:

If this is true then if they get close to a perpendicularity does the air around them heat up? 

Remember!

Causation does not equal correlation.

Just because they are dumping their excess heat into the spiritual realm doesn't mean the energy can come back out the same way.

[Karger]

1 minute ago, The Forumlurker said:

Just because they are dumping their excess heat into the spiritual realm doesn't mean the energy can come back out the same way.

Thermodynamic still applies so there should be some way to regain that energy.

[+Ed Venture]

There is, Allomancy. Its the natural method of Preservation's re-entering the physical realm.

Also the power gathers at the perpendicularity. How would standing near one push energy back through?

[Spoolofwhool]

Good point Cal. I vaguely recall this discussion.

 

On 5/29/2019 at 0:31 PM, Karger said:

Thermodynamic still applies so there should be some way to regain that energy.

Thermodynamics means that the energy exists but that doesn't mean that the energy is obtainable in any natural or easy way. My theory is that there's a giant pool of investiture in the Spiritual Realm anyways so based on Cal's theory it's just being dumped there.

[Karger]

9 minutes ago, Spoolofwhool said:

Thermodynamics means that the energy exists but that doesn't mean that the energy is obtainable in any natural or easy way. My theory is that there's a giant pool of investiture in the Spiritual Realm anyways so based on Cal's theory it's just being dumped there.

True but the fact that it exists is noteworthy.

[RShara]

11 minutes ago, Spoolofwhool said:

Good point Cal. I vaguely recall this discussion.

 

Thermodynamics means that the energy exists but that doesn't mean that the energy is obtainable in any natural or easy way. My theory is that there's a giant pool of investiture in the Spiritual Realm anyways so based on Cal's theory it's just being dumped there.

I ran across this WoB today that I find seriously interesting and seems to hint that your theory could be correct.

Quote

Eric Peters

You mentioned friday night in #Seattle Allomacy has "FTL" built into it, any more hints you can share on how that would work

Brandon Sanderson

It involves where the lost energy from thermodynamic issues goes in certain Allomantic interactions.

Tor Twitter Chat (Nov. 14, 2011)

 

[Spoolofwhool]

1 hour ago, Karger said:

True but the fact that it exists is noteworthy.

Eh, I don't think so because my opinion is that there's a massive pool of investiture lingering in the Spiritual Realm anyways so this lost investiture would just be a small drop adding to it.

1 hour ago, RShara said:

I ran across this WoB today that I find seriously interesting and seems to hint that your theory could be correct.

Interesting. Well it does feel like it might be indicating the the lost energy goes somewhere that isn't back to the shard.

[Kingsdaughter613]

On 5/29/2019 at 1:33 PM, Calderis said:

In BoM we are shown that the Southern Scadrians have a problem that makes the brass medallions a necessity for their survival. They are shown to freeze to death in what appears to be relatively mild weather in the memory that Wax views at the end of the book. 

I've long suspected the reason for this, but through a recent discord discussion with @Extesian and @Spoolofwhool I think we've nailed down the actual mechanism.

The Southerners were set aside by Rashek when he changed scadrial to preserve the original genetics of Scadrians in case his experiments in the north with the Nobles and Skaa went horribly wrong. We have a WoB, though, that he found a way to allow them to survive the heat created by moving the planet. Without the Ashmounts, or the altered genetics required from all of his cascading problems in the north. 

I believe that the method he found was a purely Spiritual alteration. 

I believe that Rashek altered the Spiritual aspect of the Southerners in a way that mimics storing in brass via Feruchemy. Storing would allow a person to survive extreme temperatures by making themselves colder. 

So I think that the problem that they suffer from, and why they specifically need Brass Feruchemy to compensate, is that there Spiritual Aspects have been altered in a way that causes the body heat that would normally be produced to essentially "store" continually, dumping body heat into the Spiritual as Investiture to make them function at a far colder level than is natural. Which, while the world was uninhabitably hot was a boon to their survival, but now leaves them perpetually on the verge of hypothermia.

Genetic information preserved, still able to survive in temperatures that should have quickly lead to heat stroke and death... And a major problem with no physical source once the planet was returned to its proper orbit. 

It still doesn't answer why Sazed didn't fix them for me, but it is a mechanism that seems to make sense. 

My older daughter has the exact same issue as the Southern Scadrians. It was caused by brain damage. She can freeze in weather I wouldn’t wear a sweater in.

An easier reason is that the people who naturally tended to get cold survived the heat better and the Southerners evolved to have lower body temperatures. So now they normally run about 95/96 degrees Fahrenheit, and easily become hypothermic.

[Calderis]

@Kingsdaughter613 while that may be effective and naturally producing a lower body temperature and have similar associated risks, I don't think that confition would have allowed them to survive in the environment of Era 1 Scadrial without the ashmounts to offer protection.

(and unrelated, that is kind of crazy.)

Edit: Besides that, to make the physical condition heredity should require a change of genetics, which is what we're told explicitly was not done to them. 

Edited October 23, 2019 by Calderis

[Honorless]

@Calderis, on a somewhat related note, in Feruchemy, Brass and Electrum were accidentally switched, iirc, but later there was something about it working narratively...

I thought that for the Southern Scadrians (and possibly the Ancient Terris) having brass store heat probably worked better as brass would be significantly cheaper. Kelsier did confirm gold was expensive on Scadrial (or at least in the Final Empire) when giving it to Vin.

Edited October 23, 2019 by Honorless

[Config2]

For the record, we also have the natural protection of the poles.

While the normally habitable central ring of Scadrial had it's seas boil and turn into scorched desert, the poles remained technically habitable. So, without the ash-mounds, life would survive in a diminished capacity on the south pole, whose population could have been even closer to the pole of the planet than the northern population. Then, genetic manipulation or no, you have 1000 years of normal evolution; people with higher tolerance to heat and lower tolerance to cold would thrive. 

Then we have the Ice Death. Everything flips, with the 1000 years of natural selection suddenly working in the wrong direction. Might be enough to generate some of the issues there in the vision with Kelsier.

Now, its been 290 years where they have atrophied their ability to insulate themselves using feruchemical brass, meaning their problems have only gotten worse.

 

I should mention that part one of this theory is a bad one; 1000 years is short for evolution, and even with perfect selective breeding, the human body could only fluctuate down a couple of degrees before it would be fundamentally different from baseline humans (what might count as genetic intervention). Those few degrees wouldn't make them "freeze to death in what might be chilly for a normal human."

Part two of this theory I think is a real possibility. The idea that they never reset to baseline after whatever TLR did to protect them from the increased heat because they had access to the brass metalminds could be the issue that they currently face. It would also mirror some of the same issues the Basin has had with developing Allomancy, and allow for a connection point.

[Kingsdaughter613]

8 hours ago, Config2 said:

For the record, we also have the natural protection of the poles.

While the normally habitable central ring of Scadrial had it's seas boil and turn into scorched desert, the poles remained technically habitable. So, without the ash-mounds, life would survive in a diminished capacity on the south pole, whose population could have been even closer to the pole of the planet than the northern population. Then, genetic manipulation or no, you have 1000 years of normal evolution; people with higher tolerance to heat and lower tolerance to cold would thrive. 

Then we have the Ice Death. Everything flips, with the 1000 years of natural selection suddenly working in the wrong direction. Might be enough to generate some of the issues there in the vision with Kelsier.

Now, its been 290 years where they have atrophied their ability to insulate themselves using feruchemical brass, meaning their problems have only gotten worse.

 

I should mention that part one of this theory is a bad one; 1000 years is short for evolution, and even with perfect selective breeding, the human body could only fluctuate down a couple of degrees before it would be fundamentally different from baseline humans (what might count as genetic intervention). Those few degrees wouldn't make them "freeze to death in what might be chilly for a normal human."

Part two of this theory I think is a real possibility. The idea that they never reset to baseline after whatever TLR did to protect them from the increased heat because they had access to the brass metalminds could be the issue that they currently face. It would also mirror some of the same issues the Basin has had with developing Allomancy, and allow for a connection point.

My older daughter CAN freeze to death in mildly cold weather. And it didn’t require genetic manipulation, but manipulation of her brain chemistry (due to brain damage.) Even a few degrees can make a very big difference.

Freeze to death is a misnomer, by the way. They don’t literally freeze; they become hypothermic very quickly, which implies an overactive cooling system and under active heating system. It’s a very extreme version of New Yorkers finding 50 degree weather comfortable, while Floridians are wearing heavy jackets. (I found it hysterical; we were at Disney, and you knew EXACTLY who came from a colder clime and who came from a warmer one.)

Humans are surprisingly adaptable. The Southerners are beginning to acclimate, with the changes reversing. Otherwise they would never have survived as long as they did in the snow.

An important missing factor is how hot the South actually was. My guess is 100/110 degrees average (around the Summer in the Sahara.) In the summer it gets much hotter, but probably not usually as hot as Death Valley has been known to get. It can’t be much hotter, or there would not be enough water for survival. However hot it was, it was not too much above the boiling point of water.

[Calderis]

10 hours ago, Kingsdaughter613 said:

My older daughter CAN freeze to death in mildly cold weather. And it didn’t require genetic manipulation, but manipulation of her brain chemistry (due to brain damage.) Even a few degrees can make a very big difference.

And I am not arguing against that fact. I am in no way trying to say that your daughters condition could not explain their symptoms. But for it to be a heritable physical change it would need to be genetic. And that's my issue. 

10 hours ago, Kingsdaughter613 said:

Humans are surprisingly adaptable. The Southerners are beginning to acclimate, with the changes reversing. Otherwise they would never have survived as long as they did in the snow.

And I don't think they have acclimated. 

Quote

Silly name, but you’ve got to call it something. The land was beautiful and warm, and then it froze.”
Marasi glanced toward Waxillium, frowning. He shrugged. “Froze?” she said. “I don’t recall hearing of freezing.”
“It’s frozen right now!” Allik said, shivering. “You had it here too, you must have. Over three centuries ago, the Ice Death came.”
“The Catacendre?” Waxillium said. “Harmony remade the world. Saved it.”
“Froze it,” Allik said, shaking his head. “The land was soft and warm, and now it is harsh and broken and frozen.”

 

10 hours ago, Kingsdaughter613 said:

An important missing factor is how hot the South actually was. My guess is 100/110 degrees average (around the Summer in the Sahara.) In the summer it gets much hotter, but probably not usually as hot as Death Valley has been known to get. It can’t be much hotter, or there would not be enough water for survival. However hot it was, it was not too much above the boiling point of water

The waters at the equator of Era 1 boiled. That's 212 degrees Fahrenheit at minimum. 

On earth verage annual antarctic temperature ranges from - 10 F at the coasts to - 60 F at the interior peaks. In comparison to those numbers, the average equatorial equatorial lowland temperatures on earth 88 F in the afternoon and 73 F at sunrise. 

Considering that temperature spread... To maintain an average temperature at the equator the would allow for th sea to continually boil... That would put at a bare minimum the average annual temperature at the equivalent of the Antarctic coast at 114 F. 

Considering the way that average temperatures are measured... I really don't think that there is a natural way that the Southerners could have survived their summers. 

Edited October 24, 2019 by Calderis

[Kingsdaughter613]

That’s why I think we need to know how hot the average temperature in the South was. We don’t know if the seas boiled all the time, or only under the correct conditions. It was almost certainly only a surface boil though.

The reason I believe they acclimated somewhat already is because, if my elder daughter went out unprotected in frigid snow, she would be hypothermic within ten minutes. The SoScads survived much longer (hours, if not days.) If they still had such strong reactions to the cold, they would have likely all been dead within the hour.

Edited October 25, 2019 by Kingsdaughter613

[Config2]

4 hours ago, Calderis said:

The waters at the equator of Era 1 boiled. That's 212 degrees Fahrenheit at minimum. 

On earth average annual antarctic temperature ranges from - 10 F at the coasts to - 60 F at the interior peaks. In comparison to those numbers, the average equatorial equatorial lowland temperatures on earth 88 F in the afternoon and 73 F at sunrise. 

Considering that temperature spread... To maintain an average temperature at the equator the would allow for the sea to continually boil... That would put at a bare minimum the average annual temperature at the equivalent of the Antarctic coast at 114 F. 

Considering the way that average temperatures are measured... I really don't think that there is a natural way that the Southerners could have survived their summers. 

We can realistically assume that the average temperature spread is a little different than what is presented here. A huge number of factors go into the disparate temperatures on Earth. We could have a thinner atmosphere. We know that the planet is exactly 1 Cosmere standard, and that Yolen is roughly Earth-like; but that might be slightly different. I'd give it the old Sci-fi +/- 10%. In that case we are dealing with 103°F which is more livable.

The big problem for me with this analysis is the Ice Death. When Kelsier visits them, he says they are freezing to death/suffering from hypothermia (as @Kingsdaughter613 mentioned) in weather that isn't that severe. But if we had an instantaneous transformation into the original planet, then the weather on the Southern Coast of the South Pole would be very cold.

For this reason, we have to consider a supernatural solution. Actually, the Ice Death part of all of this never really makes sense since we have the pole under "mildly cold" weather after the planet is restored. So maybe my question is how the pole was so temperate both before and after the Catacendre?

[Calderis]

2 hours ago, Config2 said:

We can realistically assume that the average temperature spread is a little different than what is presented here. A huge number of factors go into the disparate temperatures on Earth. We could have a thinner atmosphere. We know that the planet is exactly 1 Cosmere standard, and that Yolen is roughly Earth-like; but that might be slightly different. I'd give it the old Sci-fi +/- 10%. In that case we are dealing with 103°F which is more livable.

Every number I listed was an "annual average" 

The annual average temperate of death valley is 77.15 F. 

So I stand by my point. 

[Config2]

3 hours ago, Calderis said:

Every number I listed was an "annual average" 

The annual average temperate of death valley is 77.15 F. 

So I stand by my point. 

Well, we are looking at +10°C high on the coast in the summer according to the Australian Government, so 50°F. So, I guess about 150°F in the summer. So not really survivable outside.

Point seen.

 

That being said, the end conclusion is the same for both of us; there has to be some sort of supernatural solution implemented, and by WoB, it wasn't the genetic type implemented in the north. 

[Kingsdaughter613]

@Config2

They were at the Southern MAGNETIC pole. Since the Northern one was low enough for normal day/night cycles, the Southern one would have been high enough for the same.

I doubt the Oceans were boiling like a pot of hot water. Otherwise they would have boiled out, and the world would have grown increasingly hot as vapor built in the atmosphere. No one is surviving Venus type conditions at either pole!

We need water. So however hot it got, it could not have gotten so hot that there would not be water. Nor could it have been so hot that animals and plants died; the Southerners were not modified to eat the created foods. So we are stuck with a survivable desert; a place where plants, like cacti, and animals, like lizards, can survive. In most of those places humans can survive.

Rashek could have done something with the weather actually. A perpetual cold front, or a Summer arctic jet stream, might have been enough to cool the area. Certain topographical features could have cooled things down too. I also suspect that the Southerners lived primarily underground and were nocturnal.

Btw, did the continents drown after Rashek moved the world close to the sun? You’d think it would have...

The next time I get a leather bound, I’m asking Brandon what the average temperature was at the Southern Magnetic Pole. And at the equator. Unless someone else can ask him first...

[Calderis]

The follow-up to what I quoted from Allik above 

Quote

“Froze it,” Allik said, shaking his head. “The land was soft and warm, and now it is harsh and broken and frozen.”
“Harmony…” Marasi whispered. “Allik’s from the South, Waxillium. Haven’t you read the old books? The people from the Final Empire never went in that direction. The oceans boiled, supposedly, if you got too close to the equator.”

And there's this 

Quote

KChan

Just a random piece of worldbuilding, could be big or small, from the Final Empire, that we did not get to see in the books.

Brandon Sanderson

There's a whole bunch of stuff. Let's see what's good. Have I told people this one yet? There used to be very little water on [Scadrial]. In fact, it was mostly a dry planet; if you saw it from space, it looked like Mars, with little patches...

KChan

Did Preservation change that?

Brandon Sanderson

No, that was just the heat, and the things that were going on with moving the planet boiled off a lot of water.

KChan

I mean, putting the water back?

Brandon Sanderson

Oh, with Sazed? Yes, Sazed did. So, like, with the bodies of water you see in the map, are actually not really oceans... I mean-- like, that is the extent of it. Like, it's not actually-- I know people think that's a sea, but it's not. Well, it's an inland sea.

Questioner

It's just not that it's very habitable beyond that point?

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah.

Firefight Miami signing (Jan. 8, 2015)

There was a reason that Rashek built the Ashmounts and changed the northerners. It wasn't just the skaa and noble distinction. 

Maybe he did changes the non-human life in the south to be able to survive, but he explicitly did not change the genetics. 

Luthadel was magnetic north in TFE, and the north pole was actually warmer than TFE because it got less coverage from the ashmounts. 

Quote

Brandon Sanderson

Chapter Seventy-Six

The North Pole

One of my big challenges in the geography of this world was figuring out how we could have a kingdom set at the pole of the world while at the same time maintaining a normal day/night cycle. My original plan was for the Well of Ascension to be located a distance to the north of Luthadel, up at the geographic north pole of the planet. When I was revising the second book, I realized that wouldn't work for various reasons. (More on this on the MISTBORN 2 Alternate Ending deleted scene page.) I changed things so that when the Lord Ruler held the power in the Well, he decoupled the geographic north pole and the magnetic north pole.

In our world, the magnetic north pole is located about eleven degrees of latitude south of the geographic north pole. On Scadrial, the two poles were originally in the same location. When the Lord Ruler moved the planet too close to its sun and realized he didn't have the control to place the planet in the proper orbit, he created the ashmounts to cool the atmosphere. He also wanted to keep access to the Well under his control, so he decided to build his capital city right above it. However, he realized that on a planet with a tilted axis, a city at the north pole would have seasonal daylight variation so extreme that at the height of summer the sun would never set and during the dead of winter the sun would never rise. He could remove the axis's tilt, but that would just make the sun perpetually skirt the horizon all year round.

What Rashek decided to do (and he had to make split-second decisions in the brief time he held the power) was to shift the crust of the whole planet so that the Well was at a latitude that would have more standard seasonal variation, and to re-create the Terris mountains in the new North (to maintain the rumors that the Well was located there). He worried that the new location of Luthadel would be too hot due to the latitude, but it turned out that moving the Well created an unexpected effect. The planet's magnetic pole followed the Well as he relocated it—and the ash from the ashmounts was slightly ferromagnetic. (Ferromagnetic volcanic ash has some precedent in our world.) So the interaction of the ash with the planet's magnetic field's new alignment meant that its protective cloak over the area of the Final Empire caused it to be cooler than the now unprotected geographic north pole.

One side effect of this is that all compasses point toward Luthadel. Since it's been that way for a thousand years, no one finds it odd–in fact, it's used as evidence of the Lord Ruler's divinity. It also makes it mathematically very easy to pinpoint one's exact location in the Final Empire using a combination of the compass reading and noon observations. Not that it's easy to get lost in the Final Empire in the first place—the geographical area of the planet's surface that the Final Empire covers is actually quite small.

Ultimately, when it comes down to sophisticated geography and astrophysics, I'm out of my element. If there are mistakes in my reasoning above, that is why I write fantasy and not hard sf.

And I still haven't said anything about what happened at the south pole.

The Hero of Ages Annotations (May 4, 2010)

So Scadrial, without the Ash coverage, should have killed the Southerners. 

If it were survivable naturally, the ashmounts wouldn't have been needed in the first place. 

Edited October 25, 2019 by Calderis

[Kingsdaughter613]

That’s why I think he did something with the weather. He had to keep wherever they were cool enough for water to exist. It’s not just the SoScads - he had to create a sustainable environment. So water, food, etc. And none of it was genetically modified and, even if there was some Spiritual alteration, that still doesn’t explain where they were getting water from.

Nevermind that the South is apparently a rainforest now... or part of it is, anyway.

I wonder what happened to the water vapor... based on those words of Brandon, Scadrial should have resembled Venus - and no one was surviving that. That’s why I think we need more information. Some of this just doesn’t make sense.

[Karger]

1 hour ago, Kingsdaughter613 said:

So water, food, etc. And none of it was genetically modified and, even if there was some Spiritual alteration, that still doesn’t explain where they were getting water from.

Water can stick around at 90C but I would not want to live there.

[Kingsdaughter613]

True. But it does give us a fairly good limit on how hot it can get.