Sunken Cities of the South Pole - National Geographic Magazine, Summer 2002

Sunken Cities of the South Pole - National Geographic Magazine, Summer 2002

''Pictorial Spread (pictures deleted).   '' It gets cold in Antarctica at night. And the night lasts six months! How did a stone age civilization endure months of 50 below temperatures?

They built their cities underground. Join us for the amazing pictorials of the underworlds of the Tsalal, the Sunken Cities of the South Pole.

'''Why build underground? A phenomena called Thermal Inertia. Below three meters or ten feet underground there is a uniform temperature of approximately 55 degrees fahrenheit. Cool, but dramatically warmer than Antarctic winters. ''' The early Tsalal often dug burrows and sunken pits to endure the winter, but these were usually to protect against the fierce winds and make insulation easier. The true sunken cities did not begin to emerge until the Coal Kings. The Tsalal were the earliest peoples in the world to harvest coal. To combat the brutal antarctic nights, as their forests declined, populations turned to coal to sustain themselves. For the Tsalal, coal was the beginning of civilization. After surface deposits of coal were exhausted, the Tsalal began to dig pits and tunnels to harvest coal. Soon they began to notice that their coal tunnels maintained a constant temperature no matter what the conditions on the surface. In Winters, the early Coal Kings began to live in their own mines! Soon, they began to live there year round. The earliest Sunken Cities were actually excavated areas of coal mines. As population grew, and the techniques for digging deep into the earth and shoring up tunnels was established, Sunken Cities proliferated throuth the Tsalmothua, growing steadily in size and complexity over the millenia. 

Pictorial Sequence - Tunnels, Chambers, People. - Box Insert: Living underground was not always the safest thing to do. Earthquakes, poor engineering, flaws, mistakes, excessive tunneling could undermine the structural integrity. Above and around the cities, there were hundreds, even thousands of tons of rock and soil waiting to crush the inhabitants. In deep still pockets, bad air, or build ups of carbon dioxide would create lethal conditions. Sometimes poor ventilation or blocked vents would cause build ups of carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide that killed hundreds. Drainage could kill. Waters could flood the underground chambers, drowning everyone in the lower levels and making even upper levels uninhabitable. Close contact made disease transmission very easy. There were a hundred ways to die in the Sunken Cities, and an entire nation could vanish overnight. Archeologists have identified almost a hundred abandoned Sunken Cities. Still, many of them endured, and over thousands of years, by trial and error, the Tsalal steadily solved problems of engineering, air circulation and drainage, the Sunken Cities growing larger and more ambitious. Today, many cities have supported populations in the tens of thousands for millenia.

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Pictorial: '''Not all of the Antarctic cities were underground. '(1) Caption:'' The Yag lived in a flood basin, so they could not build underground. Instead, they build cities on stilts and piles, with fairy tail architecture, and towers connected by pathways. (2) Caption: The Zhudan have built this city into the side of a mountain. [inserts]Notice these close ups of the Zhudan terraced gardens. [insert]Close ups of windmills built into the city, the Zhudan were the first people to build windmills. (3) Caption: Some Tsalal, like these Ptarh gathered around an elephant sized giant sloth or Shaghut, do not build cities at all. (4) Caption: Landscape - Antarctica is a land of diversity and contrasts.

Pictorial: Ancient Engineers: (1) Caption: This lost Grotto would have been one of the wonders of the ancient world, if anyone had known of it. (2) Caption: This complex dating to approximately 3000 years ago contains nine immense vaulted chambers, (3) Caption: the largest of which (depicted here) is sixty feet high at the peak of its arch, forty feet wide and one hundred and eighty feet long. [Cutaway graphic of the chambers and tunnels] The ratio of 1/.6/3 is used identically for the other vaults. The tunnels and shafts reach a depth of 200 feet. No one knows why this ancient wonder was abandoned, or what happened to its people. (4) Caption: It was rediscovered in 1936, not much different from the day it was abandoned. (Library portrait of the discovery team).

Full page picture: This old woman has never seen the sun or looked at the sky. She has spent her entire life in her Sunken City. Even our low red hurt her eyes. The only light she had ever seen were from the luminiscent insects and the glimpses of the oven fires. - Picture and Caption: A close up of her scalp. The insects crawling through her hair are luminiscent insects, related for fireflys and glow worms. The Tsalal wear the insects in their scalp and genital hair. The glow bugs do not produce enough light to illuminate their tunnels, but it allows the Tsalal to see each other’s glows, and know locations and movement.

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Sub-Pictorial. Bug's Light Caption: the first a Tsalal chamber illuminated by our flash. Caption: The second, the same chamber, from the same position, with no artificial lighting, the specs of light are glow bugs on walls and floor. These pinpoints of light allow the Tsalal to know the dimensions and shapes of chambers. [insert shot of insect] Glow bugs are carnivorous insects. The Tsalal ‘farm’ millipedes in rotting vegetation and then use them to create an insect paste that they will smear on walls and doors, or in their own hair, to attract and keep glow bugs.

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The Fiery Heart - The ovens are the most closely guarded parts of the Sunken cities. Fire underground can be lethal, even where the fire itself doesn’t kill, then it may weaken structural supports, or poison through carbon dioxide or monoxide. Fire is only allowed here in the ovens, closely monitored and constantly supervised.

Pictorial Montage: Ovens, fire, workers, fire chambers, ash carts.

These ovens are the communal kitchens of the city. All cooked food is prepared here. These ovens are the source of all boiled or hot water. A network of pipes filter heat through the complex and drive the air circulation system. [Graphic Insert: Cutaway Sunken City with the Ovens and pipe networks outlined in red, air exchange and circulation vents outlined in blue.)

Pictorial Sequence: Old and New. (1) Caption: In many ways, most of the people of the Sunken Cities, like the ones shown here, live much as their ancestors did a thousand years ago. But change has a way of catching up. (2) Caption: Here, a technician monitors oven temperatures on a computer. (3) Caption: This generator, hooked to an oven turbine is not enough to provide electricity to the whole of the city, but it does sustain (4) Caption: electric lights in key chambers and grottos. (5) Caption: Wind turbines on the surface, such as these, seem perfect for the windy Antarctic landscape and promise to bring an electrical revolution to the sunken cities.

Pictorial Sequence: Unspoiled Landscapes. These pictures are of sunken cities from the outside. (1) Caption: These three aerial photos clearly show the ‘footprints’ of Sunken Cities. (2) Caption: Smokestacks and outbuildings are often the only signs of Sunken Cities. A traveller could pass right over a civilization and never notice it was there. (3) Caption: A city as viewed from a hill, almost indistinguishable from the countryside. (4) Caption: A mothbeast grazes among the smokestacks, oblivious to the hustle and bustle of the market (5) Caption: beneath its feet. (6) Caption: Perhaps the Tsalal have found a way to live with nature.

Heh heh, more Wendol parallels with the Tsalal, I see.

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I still have doubts about the logistics of some of this, although I take your point about Pre-Columbian America as the closest OTL match for the essentially Stone Age Antarctic civilizations.

I respect that. I wonder about these things myself. Could coal reserves last millenia if we had been mining regularly since a stone age? How big could a city get?

At this point, I tend to think the Ptarh empire lasts way too long.

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Having seen your latest entry, it will come under Rule of Cool - for this timeline, not so much Rule of Cool as Rule of Sub-Zero Freezing

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The National Geographic article is excellent. Do we have anyone on these forums who could provide suitable photo-realistic artwork to go with it? I can't draw to save my life.

Thank you. It's kind of fun to try to tell the story through non-standard vignettes. Leaving the pictures (that don't exist) out is a necessary evil, but in some ways, its better. The reader's imagination does a better job of visualizing potential photos than I ever could.

I may do a Sailor's Story about what these Sunken Cities are like from a less glossy, less photo-spread/touristy POV.

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The NatGeo article's really good. The sunken cities sound the coolest thing ITTL yet  and the Yag tower cities sound interesting as well!