Why isn't Hallandren wracked with earthquakes?

[ecohansen]

It seems like earthquakes should be as important in Hallandren history as war is, but no historical quake is mentioned.  Any ideas on why?

 

Why do I think Hllandren is in a tectonically active area?

 

Well, we know that Idris has four seasons--one of the main impetusses for the marriage is to delay Hallandren troop movements until winter.  We also know that Hallandren is surrounded by jungle--not forest, but jungle, with parrots and monkeys.  Third, we know that Idris and Hallandren are in easy travelling distance for a largely preindustrial civilisation.

 

On Earth, there are only two places where a jungle is that close to a place with temperate seasons: A thin strip of northern Argentina on the east side of the Andes, and the border between the Himalayan nation of Bhutan and the Indian state of Assam.  If you wanted to stretch, you might also include the Xishuangbanna rainforest in southern Yunnan and its quasi-proximity to the edges of the Qinghai Plateau in northern Yunnan.

 

All of these places are enormously tectonically active, suffering some of the world's most severe and deadly quakes.  When you're substituting elevation for enough latitude to basically skip the subtropics, you need the tallest mountains Earth can provide, and in general mountains only get that high while they're still growing.  So the Idrian mountains must be very tall indeed, and it certainly seems like they should be making quakes or volcanos.

 

Moreover, Hallandren is in an oceanside flatland bordered by mountains.  That's the sort of situation that screams that there's a collision of tectonic plates going on: think of the Andes and the Nazca plate, or think of Hallandren as a miniature version of the Indian subcontinent.

 

But there don't seem to be any quakes in Hallandren history.  Why?  Are Returned sacrificing themselves to heal the land?  Do the Pahn Kahl have a secret ritual to ward off quakes?  Is Endowment so interested in Hallandren that she is preventing quakes via direct Shardic intervention?  Or something else?

[Guest]

Olympus Mons on Mars is an example of a volcano with no plate tectonics. Because it is immobile, it is able to get much larger than anything here on Earth.

Quick primer: https://youtu.be/Nug6iuKowRk

The size of the calderas vs the height of the volcano/mountain is determined by the viscosity of the lava.

[ecohansen]

Thanks LabRat!

[Lord Pifferdoo he/him]

I actually really like this theory, Ecohansen! It's a cool thing that you've figured out, and I wouldn't put it past Sanderson, the Great and Powerful, to add something like this into his world. 

[Oudeis he/him]

How frequent would you expect a "devastasting earthquake"? Cuz recall, Vo only landed like 500 years ago, didn't he? So tectonically speaking, there hasn't been a Hallandren very long.

[Guest]

The Manywar was 8-900 years ago if I recall correctly

[Oudeis he/him]

I'm going to have to re-read but I'm almost certain Vasher is only 300 or so... where are you getting your number from?

 

EDIT: Epilogue. Vivenna, referring to Vasher. "He'd been alive for over three hundred years." Granted, 900 years is more than 300. Upon what are you basing your idea that the Manywar was 800 years ago?

EDIT AGAIN: Per Hoid in chapter 32, Vo, the First Returned, and the founding of Hallandren, happened 300 years before the Manywar. So, Hallandren in any form has only existed for six centuries. I honestly don't know if that's long enough for it to be unusual to lack a major earthquake.

 

Also, a few other things to consider. The jungle itself is very usual, not necessarily naturally tropical. Being surrounded by mountains and next to an inland sea, not just next to one mountain, could affect the climate greatly. It's also been speculated that the warmth might come about as a part of interaction with Endowment; recall that this is also the location where the first man ever Returned. There's clearly something unique about this valley, which may or may not extend to an artificial climate. Alternately, perhaps something about the local Investiture keeps a place that should be tectonically active stable. I've long wondered where the actual power for Awakening comes from; perhaps it feeds off the latent potential energy of massive underground tectonics? It's possible the Hallandren, with their Awakening, is keeping the whole region safe.

 

One last edit is upcoming, as I try to determine exactly how close Hallandren is to mountainous Idris.

Edited June 12, 2015 by Oudeis

[Windrunner he/him]

Manywar was three hundred years prior to the events of Warbreaker. The Manywar page on the wiki is complete, and could be a helpful refresher.

[Guest]

Faulty memory. Was Vu 900 years ago?

[Oudeis he/him]

Per Chapter 32, Vo was Returned 600 years ago (300 years before the Manywar). Yet I had thought Vo taught people how to Awaken; in fact Awakening was only invented 200 years AFTER Vo.

 

Also, I now need to learn Photoshop so I can take a poster for Captain America: The First Avengers and change the words to Vo: The First Returned.

 

EDIT: Chapter 32 is proving very useful... they do specifically note that the Court of Gods took control of Hallandren at the end of the Manywar, and that it was 300 years ago.

Edited June 12, 2015 by Oudeis

[Kobold King he/him]

Faulty memory. Was Vu 900 years ago?

 

Ba dum tsss.

 

 

I have nothing to add to the conversation, but here's an upvote both for a remarkable analysis and for telling me about these parts of Earth. I've often wondered whether jungles can exist nearby temperate regions in real life, but I've never been able to find specific areas where this occurs.

[Oudeis he/him]

Okay, while he comes TANTALIZINGLY CLOSE three or four times to giving us a "it is this many day's journey" from Bevalis to T'Telir, he never actually flat-out says. Which is unfortunate. However, in Siri's trip, she comments at one point that it's been "two days", and at another point it is "days later", so at least four days, and at that point they are not even yet into the jungle. Assuming that there is a well-traveled and -maintained road from Bevalis to T'Telir, which as the capitals of two major Kingdoms in the area I feel isn't too great a stretch, according to this admittedly unscientific citation, it is at minimum 160 miles from Bevalis to the edge of the jungle.

 

Eco: Do you happen to have numbers on how, exactly, far it is from the jungles of Bhutan to the temperate regions of Assam? I have attempted to google and eyeball on a map but unfortunately spatial reasoning is not one of my primary skills. Nevertheless, 160 miles does seem like an acceptable distance, just judging from the center of Bhutan to the center of Assam, which according to google maps and the route I chose is just about that far.

[ecohansen]

Oudeis, here's a map of Indian ecoregions. "29" is true rainforest, and "31" and "32" are pretty close.  You can see they are pretty darn close to the blue Himalayan Plateau: 160 miles would be generous.

Also, Nepal has had 7 earthquakes with significant fatalities since 1934, but there was a truly devastating quake in 1255 which hasn't been repeated since.  So there's definitely no guarantee of a city-toppling quake in recorded Hallandren history, but quakes with hundreds or thousands of deaths should occur several times a century, if it's at all comparable.

 

By the way, thanks for the distance estimate.  My random gut-feel had the two places a it closer.

Edited June 12, 2015 by ecohansen

[Oudeis he/him]

Thank you... the map you've provided, however, has no scale that I can see, so there's no way to tell how far apart the regions are.

 

The 160 miles is a weirdly rough estimate. In one way, it's a maximum. It's assuming the road is a straight one from Bevalis to T'Telir. Going down a mountain, it could be that a road switching back and forth going downhill and taking ten miles to traverse might only bring you one mile closer as the crow flies. I have absolutely no idea how you'd determine a good approximation of how much of the distance they actually traveled brought them closer to T'Telir.

 

On the other hand, it's also a minimum. Siri's first scene in the carriage is specifically "on the second day of the journey". The next scene is simply labeled, "Days later," than the first. This could mean no more than two days, for a total of four. It could be six days, for a total of eight. It's vague enough that it could even be inexact, and maybe it was just one more day, for a total of three.

 

My assumption on the speed of the carriage itself is also pretty random; I cannot think of an accurate way to determine how far a cart filled with princess guarded by backcountry soldiers going somewhere none of them actually want to go would travel in a day.

 

You have brought up a number of fascinating points I had not previously considered. Thank you for inviting me to think in new and interesting ways! It seems to be that the simplest explanation is just that we have a chilly mountain near a tropical valley; since we already know the first Returned, Returned there, and the Tears of Edgli will only grow there, there must simply be something nearby causing the area to be warmer than it should geographically be. However! Simple explanations aren't always true, least of all in fantasy novels. I think this is DEFINITELY a concern that warrants a question to Mr. Sanderson.

 

I don't think I've got anything else to add to this discussion, but I'll keep my eye out to see what anyone else says! Perhaps I'll be back if a thought occurs to me. (Also, my buddy, a Sharder and a climatologist, gets back home this week and will probably want to weigh in).

[ecohansen]

For scale: it's about 280 miles as the crow flies from the Bhutan border to the Indian ocean, and the band between "29" and "blue" seems to be about 1/6 of that distance, so I'd say it's about 50 miles from  seasonal Bhutan to tropical rainforest.  Wow, right?

 

And yes, it definitely could be that Hallandren is warmer than it should e, rather than the other way around.

[Oudeis he/him]

...particularly since, as Siri notes in Chapter 32 in one of the few moments of the book which admits there's a world outside their local area, there apparently aren't any known jungles elsewhere in the world. You'd think if they were at a latitude where jungles were possible, they would be able to travel as far as people are able to travel, and find other jungles.

[Mistdork she/her]

Wowza, that's impressive. I can't say I knew that was why this sometimes happened despite knowing that it could...awesome. Now I can invest more knowledge into the knowledge bank...

Anyway, I think to some extent, Endowment is doing something to the environment, making it weird at the very least, here's some WOB:

 

Q: Is there a similar relationship between Endowment and Hallandren's jungle as there is between Harmony and Elendel Basin ?

A: Yes and no. The flowers are being fed by something that's very similar to what you might find on other planets. So the ground is saturated with something that producing a similar effect as Elendel Basin. But it's not the same thing. Elendel Basin was just crafted really really well, and then it was endowed with a little bit of extra help. Here [in Hallandre's jungle] we have this extra seeping into the ground from the pool, which is saturated around and causing the flowers and causing what's going on around there. We'll wait until you've read Words of Radiance.

 

http://www.17thshard.com/forum/topic/4290-heres-some-late-stuff/

 

It could just be a the leaky shard pool. Or maybe the pool leaked because of a giant earthquake. Just because it's happened, doesn't mean that the characters know about it or think about it often...

Edited June 19, 2015 by Nymp

[ccstat he/him]

Here is a response I got in the (incredibly stil-ongoing) AMA on reddit. (source)

Q:A recent analysis on 17th Shard noted that the geography of Hallandren suggests it is an area with frequent and powerful earthquakes. Is this correct? Does Hallandren have substantial tectonic activity?

A: It does.

 

Looks like the geography-based analysis was spot on. Props to ecohansen for spotting this! (Also, great discussion so far. Lots of good points from all sides.)

[skaa he/him]

Here is a response I got in the (incredibly stil-ongoing) AMA on reddit. (source)

Looks like the geography-based analysis was spot on. Props to ecohansen for spotting this! (Also, great discussion so far. Lots of good points from all sides.)

Nice! I think congratulations are in order. *upvotes ecohansen's posts*

[Oudeis he/him]

Wow. Shows you what I know.

[Mistdork she/her]

Here is a response I got in the (incredibly stil-ongoing) AMA on reddit. (source)

 

Looks like the geography-based analysis was spot on. Props to ecohansen for spotting this! (Also, great discussion so far. Lots of good points from all sides.)

Now I am definitely going with the theory that the reason the Shard Pool leaked/bled into the surrounding area was due to a major earthquake sometime in the past (before the city was settled, because the Tears of Edgli seemed to be part of the reason it became a cultural center). This is just awesome, ecohansen.

[ARARITA he/him]

@ecohansen

 

good stuff - 1 upvote because i can only give you 1 - bravo

[ecohansen]

Thanks everyone.

 

BTW, anyone upvoting me, please upvote ccstat too--he's the one who actually got the WoB.  He got me my first beautiful shiny Confirmed Theory, and there's no gift that can be given on this forum that's quite as cool as that.  Share the love.

 

Thanks again!

Edited July 3, 2015 by ecohansen