Natural Geographic, 1982. Greenest Antarctica - Yag Country

'''Natural Geographic, 1982. Greenest Antarctica - Yag Country'''

Beyond the wetlands basins of Yag lie the Shining Thunder mountains, over a thousand miles of glacial ridge ceaselessly calving icebergs into the Antarctic ocean currents. Each year, immense sheets of ice break free or tumble down the sides of the thunder mountains, collapsing into the waters where currents eventually reduce and break them.

On the inland side of the Shining Thunders mountains, the glaciers creep down and spread onto warmer low lying table lands, casting a vast winter apron of ice and snow in the shadowlands. With the coming of dawn and the warmth of summer, warm air currents from the inland abut the glacial surfaces, bringing about streams of melt which cut through the aprons of ice and snow, creating ponds and drainage channels basins, the accumulated water drains into the Yag wetlands and is known as spring flood, full of fresh, sterile water. This water overflows river banks and finds its way into ponds, lakes and swamps.

As the Antarctic day proceeds, light comes to the shadow lands and the snow apron melts away, contributing its waters to the drainage basins. The spring flood gives way to a network of steadily flowing rivers and streams, working their way towards the sea, although much eventually ends up in lakes, swamp and marshlands.

Through the course of the Antarctic day, the streams and rives slowly rise, until drainage peaks in late summer, leading to a gentle Summer flood, carrying soil and nutrients downstream, turning lakes into swamps, swamps into marshlands and marshlands into river deltas. The ceaseless summer drainage from the glacier mountains and shadowland aprons make the Yag lowlands the wettest freshwater region in Tsalal lands.

Finally Antarctic night sets in and temperature drops, the glacial melt ceases. Precipitation falls in the form of ice and snow. The rivers and stream dry up, swamps revert to marshlands and waters seem to reverse their flow, draining back into reduced rivers and ponds. As in the rest of Antarctica, the land is shrouded in cold and darkness, waiting, once again, for the touch of the sun.

Prior to humans, the Yag Lowlands were a world unto themselves in Antarctica, as different from the rest of this strange continent, as the continent was to the world.

In the Yag Lowlands, the great Sicaripod predators, the Daggerfoot, the Hoppers, even the Devils were almost entirely absent, the grounds are too wet for them. Instead, the ferocious Carmas rule the streams and lakes as ambush predators, watching from ten thousand hidden nests.

The dominant large herbivores are the Astropotheres, wading, semi-aquatic creatures ranging from the sizes of pigs to hippos, with short trunks and assortments of tusks, as comfortable on land as in the water, ruling marshes and swamplands. Almost alone of Antarctic life, the Yag Astropotheres are semi-migratory, retreating to lakes and ponds during winter, and battening in the rivers, streams and marshes during the summer. Two species of Hive monkeys thrive in the Yag Lowlands, divided by their willingness to brave waters. Mothbeasts and Shaghui frequent the dryer areas. The Shaghut are rare, foraging in the outer regions of the basins, coming farther in as it dries out in the late summer and early winter.

This is also the country of the Yag Berry. The Yag Berry is a shoreline water loving plant which does well in the flood countries. It’s life cycle is exquisitely tuned to the two seasonal floods, producing a crop of nutrient berries for the astropotheres whose movements and migrations are also tuned to the patterns of water. The berries contain the tough seeds which germinate the new Yag plants. Competition over millions of years has produced a full ripe colourful berry to attract hungry Astropotheres. It’s the large delicious ripe berry that gets eaten. And it’s the berries that get eaten that get their seeds deposited in astropothere droppings.

The result, by the time humans were showing up, was a plant with well defined habitat, highly predictable and specific productivity, whose berries began to show up following the seasonal floods, and whose berries remained edible and ripe for an extended period. In the fall, as water leaves the system, instead of falling, the berries would often dry on their branches, retaining edible potential through the winter. In short, they found a plant which was almost pre-domesticated. This was the basis of the Yag Cultural Complex.

In Yag, the line between cultivation and simple harvesting is not so clear. Yag berries formed a significant part of the human diet literally from the start of human settlement in the region, 28,000 to 30,000 years ago. From very early on, human hunter gather routes were shaped by the ripening rates of berries in different locations. Human interactions with Yag berries became complex over time. Approximately 21,000 to 20,000 years ago, the practice had evolved of saving and carrying Yag Berry seeds in order to spread them in places where they would likely grow. The importance of Yag Berries in human diet slowly grew as Astropothere populations declined, and humans impacted migration patterns.

However, formal cultivation probably did not start until much later, over time with the slow accumulation of horticultural techniques, increasingly formalized rituals for planting and regularized planting seasons. Full scale Yag Berry cultivation, accompanied by static communities devoted to cultivation, and increasingly sophisticated water diversion, ponding and drainage systems begin approximately 17,000 years ago. The result was the evolution of a culture and an agriculture which was extremely different from that developing in the Tsalmothua region.

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This is amazing.

I've never seen anything quite like it; you put Brian Aldiss and Olaf Stapeldonto shame with this on, all the while keeping the theme and aesthetic.

Eagerly looking forward to more.

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And lets not forget, the Tchos still have to adopt a demon frog/Squid hybrid from beyond the stars as their good, invent a new 100% addictive drug, and open a chain of cannibal themed restaurants across the western world.