In case you wonder... the red place in question, I'm talking about in Brother Bear is this one:
I mean, what exactly is this red place?
It looks like hell and I insist, do they exist in real life?
Putting in your first ask here:
Yes, places like that could exist in real life in Alaska! They don’t really any more (looking exactly like that, I mean, and on that scale), but could again if there is a volcanic eruption. But since the movie is set in the distant past, it’s plausible that it was at a time when there was active volcanic activity in whatever part of Alaska the movie is set in.
This isn’t the greatest map, but it’s a quick and simple look at geothermal features in Alaska today -- mainly hot-springs. Kind of like Yellowstone? Hot springs on the surface are indicative of geothermal activity below. And as you can see, the hottest (greater than 200F) all occur along that bottom arc of the Aleutian islands.
Alaska is part of the Pacific Ocean “ring of fire”. There are active volcanoes all up and down the western coast of North and South America, across the Aleutian islands, Kamchatka in Russia, Japan of course, and down through Indonesia, and including New Zealand.
^ this is from a month and a half ago, in the central Aleutian islands.
Just do an image search for “alaska volcano” and you’ll get plenty of images.
So the fact that “Brother Bear” is set in the neolithic, thousands of years ago, without a precise date, gave them creative license to put an active lava field (or the aftermath of one) in the area the movie occupies.
Beyond that, though, I think there’s some creative liberties going on there. Although it’s hard to say.
What it kind of looks like is going on there is a broad lava field, but sometime after the peak eruption. It’s still steaming, but although the scenes are colored reddish, the lava is not still hot. (If it was, they couldn’t walk there!) It’s certainly possible to have a broad geothermal area with many, many active steam vents and fumaroles and so on -- think Yellowstone National Park (again, image search). And you can walk among them, as long as the area has cooled down enough.
The reddish color does make it seem like the lava flow there was pretty recent. But as I said, if they can walk there at all, it must be cool enough for safety. The biggest danger, frankly, is that some of those steam vents aren’t steam (i.e. super-heated water), but rather gas, some of which would be fatally toxic to living beings. Most active hot springs, even ones that are safe enough to walk amongst (like in Yellowstone) or bathe in (many places, including in Alaska at Chena hot springs near Fairbanks), smell of sulfur gas.
I guess it’s also possible that -- again, despite the red/orange color that we associate with active lava flows -- what’s depicted in the movie is more of a mud-flow field with steam vents. That would kind of explain the dead trees sticking up? Correct me if I’m wrong, but actual lava flows would not leave trees like that in the middle of them; they’d be incinerated. It’s just too hot. But volcanic eruptions, especially in places with a lot of snow, like an Alaskan volcano, can also trigger huge mud-slides due to the extremely sudden melting of the snow-pack by the lava.
At the time, the mud-slides would also be actively dangerous and fatal to anything that got caught up in them. But I don’t *think* they’re as hot as lava? They might be hot enough to kill animals or a person; but probably not hot enough to incinerate trees. The trees would still be dead (from a combo of the mud-slides and the poison gasses), but they could look like what we’re seeing there. Some of those “hills” look a bit like the structures that have developed at Yellowstone, mineral accretions around geysers and fumaroles that build up over time.
So anyway -- plausible? Yes. Alaska still has a lot of active geothermal activity today, although nothing that looks *exactly* like that. Some creative license? Yes. I think the red/orange coloring is kind of creative license. And that all of the characters are really lucky that there isn’t more poisonous gas emissions in that area. (I would personally be wary of walking through something that looked like that, unless it had been tested and someone told me it was safe.)
(Hmm, weird that it isn’t giving me the option to add tags.)
