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→Internal characteristics
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===Internal characteristics=== | ===Internal characteristics=== | ||
' | Taishibeth can be divided, roughly, into three layers: the atmosphere, extensively hydrogen with pockets of trace gasses; the oceans, liquid water, ammonia, and methane; and the crust, rock in varying states and metallic hydrogen. | ||
The atmosphere, when measured from the surface to the point where true space begins, is approximately 24000 kilometers thick. This keeps the surface, and the oceans below, warm, heated by the dual processes of the greenhouse effect and the immense pressures on the planetary core from its gravity. Despite violent storms wracking the planet on the super-continental scale there exists life aplenty drifting along the turbulent currents. Many of these are collective organisms, resembling enormous floating jellyfish. They feed on aerial colonies of plankton and algae. Others follow the lightning storms, feasting on the energy discharges. Others are massive winged entities, some of these reaching wingspans of ten kilometers or more, hunting the floaters. The most notable of these are a species of enormous bird-like creatures, tentatively termed “rocs”, apparently at the top of the food chain. Incredibly there exist floating continents, solidifed hydrogen and other gasses that have formed on the canopies of some of the most massive of the floaters, which can measure up to twenty kilometers around. Upon these alien continents live entirely unique ecosystems of wholly unique organisms similar to Terran species, not unlike the Galapagos Islands. | |||
The surface, meanwhile, is hostile to all forms of known life in spite of the relatively balmy temperatures of 300 K prevalent upon it. Lighting storms frequently cover large swathes of the surface, pouring hydrogen and methane rain upon the scarred and pitted ground. Mountains are blasted into rounded mounds with no discernable features; caves exists on the leeward side, but are seldom protected for long. Cryovolcanoes and hydrothermal vents are common, adding their erupting plumes to join the stormy fray. Great canyons and vents honeycomb the "land", cutting across the shallow seas and join with vast underground cave systems which penetrate deep into the subglacial oceans below. The largest, and most stable, of these is called Cronus, providing a direct link between the blasted overworld and the peaceful underworld. | |||
The subglacial oceans beneath, spanning a mere eighty kilometers deep at their most extreme, are largely walled off from the surface by shifting cave systems and crushing ice packs; seldom are these tunnels stable, the great tectonic currents of the mountains below pushing and squeezing any sort of escape. The seas are ice water mixed liberally with ammonia, methane, liquid hydrogen, and trace elements. Vast mountainous chains break up the ocean floor, anchoring the continents above; offshoots of the surface volcanoes are plentiful, and are host to vast and complex ecosystems that live near poisonous and concentrated salt oceans. Upside-down waterfalls are common sights. The spaces between the mountain ranges and volcanoes are perilous, full of supercritical fluids hostile to even chemoautotrophic life, the haunt of predators capable of surviving there. | |||
At the very bottom is the ocean floor, a mixture of metallic hydrogen and superheated rock, provoked into searing heat by the crushing power of Taishibeth's own gravity. Even here life has made a home. Most life native to Taishibeth lives in the oceans. Chemotrophs make up the food web, their entire biosphere and global biodiversity built to live inside the ocean. Every species observed is bioluminescent. | |||
Owing to lower genetic diversity around ninety percent of extant species exist in symbiotic relationships, forming the enormous forests of coral and seaweed that cover the slopes and hillsides of underground mountain ranges and vast drifting swarms of plankton and algaes. The other ten percent is estimated to be ordinary invertebrates, vertebrates, and other individual animals. These range from massive herbivorous beasts stretching almost a kilometer in size in their wingspan (from abyssal gigantism) to tiny predators less than a foot in size. They feed off of hydrocarbons for nourishment, such as acetylene, and either directly from other organisms or from the environment. | |||
==History== | ==History== | ||