from the whatever-happened-to-the-Even-Seasons? dept.
A central conceit of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire books (and the popular HBO series Game of Thrones based on them) is that the seasons of the planet where they take place are not as predictable as the Earth's annual cycle. Somehow the phrase "winter is coming" wouldn't seem as foreboding if you could reply, "Yes, that usually happens in December through February."
But how could a planet have unruly seasons? Earth's seasons are due to the tilt of its axis. During one part of Earth's orbit, the Northern Hemisphere is tilted away from the Sun, with the resulting indirect sunlight spread thin over the surface of the hemisphere, causing winter. On the opposite side of its orbit, summer comes as this hemisphere is tilted toward direct sunlight. There isn't much room in such clockwork for randomness.
Well, if you've ever wanted to debate fan theories, here's an excellent new resource for you to draw from: a real climate model simulation of Westeros and Essos.
Source: Ars Technica
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 27 2017, @02:28AM (3 children)
I figured it was just a cycle like this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glacial_period [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Wednesday December 27 2017, @02:48AM
Me too!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday December 27 2017, @03:12AM (1 child)
This post shows why we need a new -1 mod, for "uses mobile Wikipedia link". Stop doing that; it's fucking annoying.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Wednesday December 27 2017, @03:14AM
Actually, another solution, since the source code is well within the control of the mods, might be to simply automatically alter any Wikipedia links to eliminate that fucking ".m".
(Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday December 27 2017, @02:36AM (2 children)
Is the climate model really the issue? Isn't it more like there is no real sense of distance, time and space in the show. People move by the blink of an eye (or cut of a scene) seemingly since we don't know how much time really passes from one end of the world to the next. So they sitting around chilling in Winterfell and then *bam* next scene they (the same characters) have magically appeared in Dragonstone (or some other place) and then all of a sudden they are back up at the Wall etc. Weeks have probably passed by but there is no indication of that. OK "magic" and Dragons might fly at the speed of a airliner but then not everyone gets a ride.
So I have bigger issues with the show then that the climate model seems a bit wonky.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Grishnakh on Wednesday December 27 2017, @03:12AM (1 child)
They do attempt to portray journeys as taking quite some time, they just don't show it much. When Eddard and Co. traveled from Winterfell to King's Landing in season 1, I'm pretty sure they explicitly said it would take a couple weeks or something like that, and they showed the incident with Hound killing the little kid at one of the stopping points along the way. Traveling to Dorn by ship similarly took some time; it took Danyreus plenty of time to travel across Essos, it took some time for Arya's party to travel from King's Landing north towards the Wall, and they had stopped to camp when they were attacked, etc. They don't always do the greatest job of conveying to the viewer just how long it really takes to get anywhere, and time constrains (1 hour per episode) probably has something to do with that, but it is built into the story. As far as the dragons, yes, those do travel quickly since they can fly, but we've only seen them used as transport recently (going past the Wall to rescue Jon Snow and co.).
There's some issues with the show, but personally I don't think the sense of distance is as much as you're making it out to be. They're skipping over all the long journeys, but they are in the story, and probably have to do with why you sometimes don't see some characters for a while.
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Wednesday December 27 2017, @01:14PM
I agree mostly. Latest season has not followed the travel-takes-time logic.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Wednesday December 27 2017, @03:03AM (4 children)
I'm not an astrophysicist, so I'd love to hear a theory from one of them, but in my opinion, there's two important points here:
George RR Martin seems to me to be a little bit sloppy with a lot of more-technical things; for instance, he obviously didn't think that much about the languages in this fantasy realm the way JRR Tolkein did. Tolkein invented a couple of actually viable languages for his stories, whereas Martin has his knights called "Ser" instead of "Sir", even though on a fantasy world, the idea that they'd be using Latin characters and would care about 'e' vs 'i' is pretty silly. Normally in fantasy fiction like this, we presume that the primary language is something not-English, and we only hear the translated version for the benefit of the viewer/reader, but Martin actually makes a bunch of references to English puns and such. So I really don't think Martin really thought this part through that much, since all his focus seems to be on characters.
Anyway, how do we know that a "year" on this planet, whatever it's called, actually corresponds to an orbital cycle? These people are pretty technologically backwards, and maybe their idea of a "year" is more like a month to us, except ~10x longer, because their orbit is much slower than ours.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 27 2017, @03:15AM (3 children)
Tolkien didnt invent languages for his stories, he invented stories for his languages because no one would care about them otherwise. The stories were an afterthought.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 27 2017, @04:02AM (1 child)
Not sure why this got modded funny. This is what he says in the preface.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Wednesday December 27 2017, @04:22AM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 27 2017, @08:01AM
Sounds like you haven't actually read a Tolkien story.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 27 2017, @03:06AM (4 children)
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday December 27 2017, @03:22AM (3 children)
That's very interesting, but the problem with that is that the characters never talk about the huge gas giant and its companion planet taking up much of their sky, and they're never shown on-camera even though they'd be impossible to miss.
Perhaps the planet is tidally-locked to the binary pair (though this seems to be precluded according to the article), and this moon is very large, with both continents Westeros and Essos on the far side, so the inhabitants can't ever see the worlds they're orbiting, and they've never taken the long way around by ship or even tried.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by zocalo on Wednesday December 27 2017, @10:46AM
That allows for the irregular frequency and duration of summers and winters within human timescales since they are not really defined in the books as seasons per se, but more by temperature and day length - even after winter officially arrives, there are still plans being laid for setting aside food stocks from harvests. Nor does it preclude that there could also be more traditional seasons from an ellipitical orbit going on as well. The biggest problem GRRM sets is the change in day length, and that during the Long Night daytime didn't come at all, but there's a human precedent for that too; the tradition in Islam is that the moon be physically observed to determine the start of Hajj - if it's cloudly it doesn't count and Hajj gets delayed. Perhaps some combination of a similar practice applied to extended periods without sighting the star, a physically dimmer star reducing light levels considerably, and inclement winter weather making clear skies less likely are used on Planetos? A huge stretch to be sure, but again, I don't recall GRRM writing anything that specifically rules it out.
That's still not perfect though - glacial periods tend to mean clearer skies because the cold temperatures draw moisture out of the air as precipitation, but prevent it returning as it gets locked up in ice, and there's less exposed sea water to replenish the stocks. I think that's the point we needed another round of beers though, so I don't recall working out an answer to that one beyond "well, maybe it's all just fucking magic after all - what are you drinking?" :)
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Wednesday December 27 2017, @01:21PM (1 child)
Game of Thrones is based on medieval England. Apart from the weather oddities, such as long summer/winter and Land of Always Winter, the geography is basically similar to what the English thought the world look like:
1. North is cold
2. (Middle-)East is mystical (Asshai) and full of magic.
3. There are dragons in the East.
4. There is a sea between England and the land to the east.
6. The blondes have conquered England.
Et cetera. Basically just imagine that every myth that got regurgitated in medieval England is true and you have got Game of Thrones.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday December 27 2017, @05:28PM
Not quite. Dorn is in Westeros, but far south, and there's no place in England that looks like that; it's nearly tropical.
(Score: 1) by pdfernhout on Wednesday December 27 2017, @04:43AM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_stream [wikipedia.org]
https://phys.org/news/2016-07-gulf-stream-slowdown-europe-worst.html [phys.org]
http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112712586/gulf-stream-new-england-101312/ [redorbit.com]
Although, this suggest other possibilities like mountain formation or unstable atmospheric patterns:
http://ocp.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/div/ocp/gs/ [columbia.edu]
"Fifty percent of the winter temperature difference across the North Atlantic is caused by the eastward atmospheric transport of heat released by the ocean that was absorbed and stored in the summer.
Fifty percent is caused by the stationary waves of the atmospheric flow.
The ocean heat transport contributes a small warming across the basin."
So, it may be a mix... If such a place existed. :-)
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 27 2017, @06:56AM
It is possible, that prior to The Iron Throne, they were ruled by Republicans, who denied science in favor of profit from Petrochemical Corporations and White Wraiths and Khallows, and sent the entire seasonal basis of their planet all akimbo. And gave rise to Dragons. According to the "Reign of Fire", "only thing worse than dragons: Americans." (Gerald Butler's character said those lines! I think he believed them!)