The Artechocene World: The Ourean Mountains
39 million years after our era, the Artechocene is a very different time in many aspects, mainly in its geography. As the movement of the tectonic plates has resulted in drastic changes to the landscape of many areas, and in nowhere is it more evident than in the former basin of the Mediterranean Sea, now pushed up to form one of the biggest mountain ranges in earth, the Ourean Mountains.
It is a region of gradients and extremes, that hosts an incredible biodiversity hotspot thanks to a plethora of microclimates spread across its vast extension. It is bordered on the north by the European region and the Atlantic Ocean, which brings rain and covers the northern slopes in temperate rainforests, temperate open forests and meadows. To the south, it is bordered by the largest expanse of sand on earth, the Sahara desert, which brings dust that can act as fertilizer, but without a drop of water, which forces organisms here to adapt to its incredibly harsh conditions, and so the southern slopes are superficially bare, rocky with sparse vegetation, but with unique ecosystems taking advantage of microclimates and phreatic deposits spread around its geography.
Some notable features of the geography of this extensive range that contribute to its biodiversity include:
The Iberian Cape region is surprisingly similar to its modern counterpart, an incredibly mountainous region, with wet temperate rainforests covering the northern areas, and getting progressively drier towards the interior plateaus and Souther coasts, with a significant difference that now the former Mediterranean coast is comprised of high peaks all along it.
It is now also because of that even more isolated, bordered by high mountain ranges that limit the fauna and flora that can disperse there. This isolation and the gradient of environments found alongside it have resulted in a very particularly high biodiversity within the European region.
These salt plains are probably the largest expanse of salt on earth, resulting in a rift forming in the Liguro-Provencal and Algero-Balearic basins, and that allowed these basins full of salt deposits and brine to rise up and stay extended, not be crushed by the formation of the Ourean mountains. And despite the fact that its activity has slowed and its extension is shrinking, it's still a vast, mostly empty desert of salt littered with rocks from the emerging rift and enormous salt lakes from the brine deposits below. Occasionally, regions of it receive water via snowmelt from the higher peaks around, creating a reflective blanket as far as the eye can see.
This area of the central interior basins of the Ourean mountains are amongst if not the most inhospitable places on Earth. Temperatures on the lowest basins can reach well over 60°C in the summer days, while reaching to well below freezing during the night, especially in the winter. Some places have not seen a drop of rain in centuries, and the few water that can be found is in the form of hypersaline pools or underwater deposits. Despite these conditions, a few resilient organisms are able to survive and thrive in this hellscape.
These extraordinarily hostile conditions, combined with the plentiful deposits of deposits of evaporites like salt and gypsum, are not ideal for life, but allow for the formation of an incredibly rare landscape, gypsum dunes. The lack of water allows these minerals to not be diluted by rain, but be eroded by the wind and accumulated inside the basins, forming vast expanses of blindingly white, scorching hot dunes.
North of the Alpine region of the mountains, the plentiful rain has accumulated in the Pannonian basin, forming a large freshwater lake. It is quite unique among the rest of European freshwater lakes, as it has no outflows and is hardly connected to the rest of the waterways. And so, despite its size compared to other lakes and inland seas of Eurasia, it has developed its own very unique ecosystem descendant of the few riverine fish and invertebrates that entered its waters when it formed.
The Mediterranean Ridge is a former undersea mountain range turned into one of the most significant ranges in the ourean mountains, being one of the main contributors to the isolation of the interior basins of the Abominharenas, and to the blocking of the Nile River to drain into said basins.
Like other ranges in the ourean mountains, it is rich in soluble rocks like limestone, which means the enormous mountains are also filled with kilometres and kilometers of caves, often with large deposits of water of various salinities depending on the region. This is actually the place where most of the biodiversity lies in the regions which have a more inhospitable surface environment, as the caves provide a place sheltered from surface conditions, and with plenty of nutrients in a lot of cases thanks to various communities of lithotrophic microbes that feed on inorganic substances and form the base of a food chain inside them without the need of light.
The many small basins within the Aegean sea allowed for a very unique landscape to appear once the region rose up high to fuse with the Anatolian region in a single plateau. The region is sprinkled with thousands of small alpine lakes, with varying salinities depending on their distance to the Black Sea and how much rain they receive or outflow they suffer. This has resulted in this being a popular passing area for many birds migration over the range, as well as a lot of diversity in aquatic species, which a lot of species that are endemic to a single or a small group of lakes.
An enormous Garden of Eden in a sea of scorching sand and rocks, the Osiris Basin acts as a pathway to many organisms to live much deeper into the desert that they could otherwise, and even adapt to the surrounding mountains eventually. This inland delta of the Nile River used to be a small inland sea, the last remnant of the Mediterranean sea, but being fed by one of the largest rivers on earth means that it was maintained by a lot of water but it was also slowly filled in by thousands of tons of sediment.
Eventually, the result was this, the largest inland delta in the world, with a few small brackish lakes on what remains of the deepest parts of the ancient sea. In the wet season, it turns thousands of hectares of desert and scrubland into a bustling wetland ecosystem, returning to its almost dead state in the dry season, with the only life clinging around the small lakes remaining. This extreme seasonality and connection to the rest of the continent means this a biodiversity hotspot, and a key place for many migratory species to come here and reproduce.
I hope you liked this map I want to make more of them focusing on different areas of the Artechocene Earth, until the next one! :>
