Climate Scientist Takes on Tolkien's Middle Earth

The climate of Mordor would be similar to West Texas, according to researchers

By Nathanael Massey and ClimateWire

A map of Tolkien's Middle Earth. Image: Roman Soto/Flickr

If a dark wizard chops down a forest -- technically a renewable biofuel -- to feed the

machine of industry, is his carbon footprint still zero? What are the fugitive methane

levels of dwarfish gem mines? How much carbon is sequestered by the average adult

Ent?

If these are the questions that keep you awake at night, rest easy -- researchers at the

University of Bristol in England are on the case.

Using techniques similar to those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,

the researchers recently produced a set of simulations depicting climate systems on

Middle Earth, the fantastic world created by J.R.R. Tolkien that serves as stage for his

"The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings."

Their findings, published via the University of Bristol, explore the rain-shadow

effects of the Misty Mountains, crop viability in the black lands of Mordor and the

importance of Elvish High Councils in determining future climate sensitivity.

"Because climate models are based on fundamental scientific processes, they are able

not only to simulate the climate of the modern Earth, but can also be easily adapted to

simulate any planet, real or imagined, so long as the underlying continental positions

and heights and ocean depths are known," said professor Richard Pancost, director of

the Cabot Institute at the University of Bristol.

An author, poet, professor and linguist, Tolkien crafted his world in minute detail,

creating a meticulous geography of coastlines, mountains, forests and oceans. Using

these invented topographies as a spatial map, the Bristol researchers ran a U.K. Met

Office climate model to simulate atmospheric, oceanic and land surface conditions --

much in the same way that paleoclimatologists reconstruct weather patterns for early

and pre-human history.

Cloudy with a chance of brimstone Residents of Middle Earth would have experienced a climate similar to that of

Western Europe and North Africa, they found, with regional differences based on

topography.

Northeasterly regions like the Shire and Rivendell would have seen cool weather and

ample rain moving in from the western seas, giving them a climate similar to that of

Belarus in Eastern Europe or Leicestershire in the United Kingdom.

Farther west, the craggy peaks of the Misty Mountains would block much of that

precipitation, casting a rain shadow over much of the inland kingdom. Tolkien,

appropriately, termed these areas the "Brown Lands."

To the south, the dark realm of Mordor -- described in the Tolkien books as "a barren

wasteland, riddled with fire, ash, and dust," where "[t]he very air you breathe is a

poisonous fume" -- would have had a climate comparable to West Texas, according to

the report.

Forests would have lined much of the country's interior, the authors note, possibly

extending in a continuous mass all the way from the Shire to Isengard. The

confidence of this particular finding is relatively low, however, since Tolkien's trees

tended to uproot themselves and wandered around in packs.

An alternative view of the past According to his letters, Tolkien created his Middle Earth narratives, in part, as an

origin mythology for his native England. While the country's neighbors all enjoyed

some kind of epic explaining their place on Earth -- the ballad of Beowulf in

Denmark, Scandinavia's Norse mythology or the Kalevala in Finland -- England's

checkered past of conquest and conflict deprived it of a mythic origin of its own.

According to biographer Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien once said that "the theater of

my tale is the Earth, the one on which we now live, but the historical period is

imaginary." The author is said to have set the "Lord of the Rings" story line between

6,000 and 7,000 years ago.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=climate-scientist-takes-on-tolkiens-

middle-earth