NationStates Jolt Archive

Things were becoming worrisome on the second planet.
The Menelmacari were throwing extra comets around, under the pretense of adding water. Not a bad idea, in itself, but premature by any standard- a hairline sooner, and the whole thing would be a wash with the added water vapor pumping up the greenhouse effect even higher than before. And that was just the normal, expected bit. A planetary assault would ruin anyone's day.

Thank goodness for the Solar Shade.

Now, it would rain. Not for days, not for weeks, not even for months. A global monsoon that would endure for years on end, covering the surface with hypersaline acidic waters, eventually cooling to the point that Urey's reactions would pull CO2 into the water and condense it as carbonate rock.

Dr. Hillary stood, arms folded, behind one of the diamond windows of the Atalanta colony, flanked by the Snel whose real name was annoyingly long, known to the humans of the city as Phil.

Outside, dim beams of twilight shown through the surface of the powerfully acidic flourosulphuric sea growing up around the city. Even the Snel had not yet developed an organism to live there. But bits of organic debris occasionally drifted down from above, bubbling as they were steadily dissolved. From the highest yet unsubmerged towers, one could just make out the outlines of jellybirds and skysharks floating in the Venerian atmosphere, and the troubled surface of the sea disturbed by rain below. A pity that they would all die as the atmosphere condensed- but they paved the way for the next wave of organisms, and their sinking nets and shells would help in their own small way to clear the carbon dioxide from the air.

Dr. Hillary and the rest of the colony looked on as the rising seas slowly covered over the highest spires of the Atalanta colony. With the advent of water came the rapid reduction of atmosphere as it was soaked into the seas and precipitated as carbonate rocks.

As pressures dropped, the Snel watched with mixed sorrow and joy as the last of their creations fell from the sky. Few of them would inhabit this world again, but their blueprints were forever saved in the Library of Life, should they ever be needed. Not only did lifeforms fall, though- also the Flying Islands. Now hovering mere hundreds of meters above the sea in the reduced atmosphere, the enormous airborne islands of C360/C720 gathered themselves over the Snel territories.

As temperatures dropped, the thin crust of this world further solidified and contracted out of its previosuly plastic state, putting enormous strain especially on the lowland, thin-crusted regions... such as Atalanta. Cythereoquakes began to violently rock the land and seas, throwing up tsunamis on newly formed uninhabited coasts. A faultline began to form through Atalanta, and the Snel there watched it carefully, wary of its approach near the colony. Were it to avoid destroying them, it would provide a strong source of geothermal energy.