This prompted an interesting thought experiment.
Quote from: billy rubin on October 22, 2022, 03:29:18 PMif i had a magic wand i would enact a reality in which the earths axis was at 90 degrees to the ecliptic, so that seasonality by time would be replaced by seasonality by latitude .
so if you liked winter you could just live there and the difference between spring and summer would be a day trip.
soryy about the perpetual hurricanes and continental glaciation but im still wirking out the details
The poles would never unfreeze. What would the jet streams do?
all ive thought sbout so far is ice. dunno about jet streams
certainly there would be a latitude at which the snow would barely not melt on the hottest day of the summer. that would eventually accumulate into the two mile thick continental glaciers of the pleistocene and earlier ice ages. the increased albedo would result in further advance towards the equator. dunno where it would stabilize.
weather would be really interesting. permanent cyclonic latitudes, ending of monsoons, replacrd by what?
strange idea. how much do the trade winds snd otjer permanent atmospheric energy transfers vary with seasons? hydrologic cycle? ocean currents.
Well with vast quantities of water locked into the poles would there even be any equatorial oceans?
dunno
at the height of the most recent glaciation, i think sea levels were some 100 metres lower than now. an orthogonal rotational axis would result in at least that much ice, but open ocean depths average around 4000 metres
so theres a lot of water . even stuff like the gulf of mexico or the south chins sea are 1200 to 1500 metres. but seamounts and sunken atolls would all come up. as would lots of landbridges.
britain and france would be having to cooperate again
but your weather speculation is very interesting. what were the patterns with a huge mass of ice at the poles? with possibly a huge warm region at the equator?
bigger deserts at the western cintinental edges, or smaller?
seasonality tends to average out fluctuations. where would conditions go into positive feedback and how far would tbey go?
What's with all the fanciful angles?
In the orthogonal model with a hot equator and cold poles hot wet air would rise during the day and flow to the poles as cold dry air pours back from the poles. The equatorial flow would dump its moisture as it rose and cooled and flowed towards the poles. I would expect a dynamic balance to be achieved as the glaciers flow towards the equator where they would warm and melt.
It would be interesting to see how the continental masses would locally effect the equator to pole air flows.
I would expect the salinity of the equatorial ocean to be higher than it is now with so much fresh water locked at the poles.