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Something I've been pondering lately is what an extreme low altitude climate would be like. I'm thinking of how different places like La Paz and Quito are from their sea-level equivalents, and wondering what the inverse would be.
Currently, these places are limited to a few dry-climate basins scattered throughout the world, and they're not so deep as to greatly affect the climate versus nearby sea-level equivalents. And in wet-climate areas, these basins fill up with lakes and overflow in rivers!
However, throughout Earth's history, this wasn't always the case. I'm thinking times of dry Mediterranean in the Messinian Salinity Crisis:
A climate like this most likely would have been much like the Dead Sea, only hotter, much hotter, with some really extreme summer temperatures.
However, it might be fun to indulge in a little science fiction at this point. Say that the endorheic basin was long; perhaps a rift valley long enough to span several climate zones north to south, and for the rivers to flow down and dry up in hotter, more arid parts.
Certainly a wet-tropical version of this climate sounds like a steamer. As one gains altitude, the air thins, the temperature gets cooler overall, the UV gets more intense, the dewpoints decrease, and the difference between night and day grows larger. So invert all that and add 10C for a place a thousand meters down, and I'm imagining a frightening place continually steaming around 40C.
Well, at least you wouldn't get much of a sunburn.
Further poleward speculation becomes more fun. Take a subarctic city like Murmansk Russia. What would a city like that be like a thousand meters down?
Well, raise the annual temperatures by 10C and you have a subtropical climate with a midnight sun!
However, I'm thinking it might still be very cloudy if it still had strong maritime influences nearby. That combined with the low sun angle and great depth might make it very gloomy. And would it still get all those rainy days, or would much of its summer percipitation vanish before it ever hit the valley floor?
I wonder how much these basins would be prone to temperature inversions. Perhaps my lowland Murmansk would face severe winter temperatures inspite of its depth due to polar night; I'm thinking of the extremes common in valleys in Alaska and the Yukon. On the flip side, what would a nightless subtropical summer really be like? As lower altitude means higher dewpoints, it might get unrelentingly sweaty at times, even in comfortable temperatures. And while it seems likely a deep valley would be beneath Atlantic-style gales, would it face strong katabatic winds from the surrounding area far above?
And if people lived, worked, and spent their lives at 1000-2000 below sea level, would these folks experience altitude sickness when they reached sea level? And hey, what would cooking be like with boiling points creeping noticeably above 100C?
Open to speculation here, just though this would be fun.
Dead sea is lowest point right? According to wiki its 10c warmer during summer than Nearby JERUSALEM and 8c warmer than AMMAN.
I think at somewhere like Murmansk it may be different, during winter at least. Ojmjakon is far lower, but also far colder than the surrounding mountains due to a season long inversion, and sun/winds too weak to shift it. I suspect a similar result for Murmansk.
It would be interesting to see a climate like Murmansk that far below sea level. Coconut palms under a midnight sun?
I once did an experiment where I shifted Canada to where the Tropic of Cancer ran through Toronto and calculated the climates from that. It was quite interesting
A climate like this most likely would have been much like the Dead Sea, only hotter, much hotter, with some really extreme summer temperatures.
However, it might be fun to indulge in a little science fiction at this point. Say that the endorheic basin was long; perhaps a rift valley long enough to span several climate zones north to south, and for the rivers to flow down and dry up in hotter, more arid parts.
Certainly a wet-tropical version of this climate sounds like a steamer. As one gains altitude, the air thins, the temperature gets cooler overall, the UV gets more intense, the dewpoints decrease, and the difference between night and day grows larger. So invert all that and add 10C for a place a thousand meters down, and I'm imagining a frightening place continually steaming around 40C.
Would a location like that (dry land at the depth of the Mediterranean sea) even be inhabitable or would the high temperatures cook you to death?
If places like Death Valley, the Dead Sea etc. are already so hot at no more than a few hundred meters, at the Mediterranean sea's latitude a kilometer or more down would be definitely hellish.
I wonder if there were living things down there at that time in history?
Once the Mediterranean sea level got low enough, the evaporation of the water would rapidly increase, creating a runaway effect (more evaporation -> lower sea level -> hotter temperatures -> more evaporation). Perhaps the level slowly declined and then at a certain level it just took off and the remainder took very quickly.
I think I've heard of this through a documentary (I believe BBC's Wild Europe/Europe: a natural history).
It was mentioned that it happened a few times in the past when the Med. sea got closed off by a landbridge and dried, but once the barrier broke(?) and the sea "refilled" from the Atlantic through the strait, the resulting flow would have made Niagara falls look like a trickle.
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