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sawylAn extremely nice piece of outreach work from Dan Lunt, a palaeo-climatologist from Bristol University, who took various maps produced by Karen Fonstad based on Tolkien's works and used them as the basis for a climate simulation using the Unified Model. The work captured peoples' imaginations, generating articles in the newspapers and going viral online. The presentation included a high level discussion of the assumptions applied to the model — including their justifications in Tolkien's works — a consideration of the results, and a discussion of the implications for our Earth.
As a climate scientist and keen Tolkien fan, Lunt decided to combine his two enthusiasms to see what would happen if he tried to model the ocean and atmosphere of Middle Earth. One of his reasons for doing this was to show people that the models were general purpose tools, rather than things that were specifically tuned to our Earth as the skeptics often suggest. When he submitted the proposal to NERC, most of the responses were positive — although one noted that the environment of Middle Earth was not well constrained — and the research could have high impact on public understanding!
It was assumed that the physical properties of Middle Earth were similar to our own and, although Tolkien's writings indicated that the sun was closer, it must also have been weaker making it possible to assume the same levels of solar input. The level of CO2 was left unspecified by Tolkien, so it was assumed to be relatively high based on Saruman's deforestation projects, orc activity, and volcanic emissions from Mount Doom. The most significant assumptions were related to the shape of the continents — no solid data for the entire world seems to exist for the Third Age — and the shape of the world, which needed to be transformed from Tolkien's original disk shape onto a sphere for the model to run.
After an initial numerical instability caused by the high mountain ranges, the model ran for 70 simulated years using a low resolution — "grid boxes the size of Wales" — and a 30 minute timestep. The results where largely as expected: poles were cold; interiors showed continental cooling; mountains showed rainfall shadows; and pressure lines showed prevailing trade winds similar to Earth. Vegetation predictions showed good matches for Tolkien's descriptions, e.g. Morder was a mix of hot desert and rough scrubland, while the grasslands of Rohan, which the model suggested should be forest, could be explained as product of human intervention — something Tolkien mentions in the posthumous apocrypha. The results were also compared against Tolkien's descriptions of locations as summarised in the Atlas and found to provide a good match.
Using the results of the model, it was possible to match specific places in Middle Earth with similar locations on Earth. These showed that the Shire was most like Lincolnshire or Leicestershire — and that, climate-wise, the films would have been better using a location close to Dunedin rather than North Island. Mordor, amusingly, was found to match well with both Los Angeles and parts of West Texas, as well was Alice Springs in Australia. The work was published on the web and summaries of it appeared in various newspapers. Thanks to the magic of LaTeX, it was possible to display it both in dwarvern runes and elvish characters; no attempt was made to convert into proper language by the authors, but someone on the internet has since translated the abstract into genuine elvish!
The presentation concluded with some comments on terrestrial climate models and the strength of their predictions for the future. As might be expected, the results are not good: current projections indicate that we're heading for the worst case IPCC prediction with 1,000 ppm of CO2 by the end of the century, with the possibility of 10 degree rises at the poles and six degrees in the UK — in contrast, the last ice age was triggered by a global average temperature decrease of four degrees.
As a final aside, Lunt noted that following the publicity of his Tolkien work, he'd received a number of requests from authors with maps who were eager to repeat the project with their world. He was interested in the idea of building a simple tool that could be used to do this, but didn't have the time to do it himself...
Since the presentation touched on something related to my chosen profession, I made a point of going up and saying hello afterwards — not difficult because it was a fun bit of work and I've been to enough climate presentations over the years that I don't sound completely clueless.
I also got talking to one of the book sellers who, it transpired, had studied palaeo-climatology and had applied for a summer internship with the Hadley Centre and was keen join our happy little band...
As a climate scientist and keen Tolkien fan, Lunt decided to combine his two enthusiasms to see what would happen if he tried to model the ocean and atmosphere of Middle Earth. One of his reasons for doing this was to show people that the models were general purpose tools, rather than things that were specifically tuned to our Earth as the skeptics often suggest. When he submitted the proposal to NERC, most of the responses were positive — although one noted that the environment of Middle Earth was not well constrained — and the research could have high impact on public understanding!
It was assumed that the physical properties of Middle Earth were similar to our own and, although Tolkien's writings indicated that the sun was closer, it must also have been weaker making it possible to assume the same levels of solar input. The level of CO2 was left unspecified by Tolkien, so it was assumed to be relatively high based on Saruman's deforestation projects, orc activity, and volcanic emissions from Mount Doom. The most significant assumptions were related to the shape of the continents — no solid data for the entire world seems to exist for the Third Age — and the shape of the world, which needed to be transformed from Tolkien's original disk shape onto a sphere for the model to run.
After an initial numerical instability caused by the high mountain ranges, the model ran for 70 simulated years using a low resolution — "grid boxes the size of Wales" — and a 30 minute timestep. The results where largely as expected: poles were cold; interiors showed continental cooling; mountains showed rainfall shadows; and pressure lines showed prevailing trade winds similar to Earth. Vegetation predictions showed good matches for Tolkien's descriptions, e.g. Morder was a mix of hot desert and rough scrubland, while the grasslands of Rohan, which the model suggested should be forest, could be explained as product of human intervention — something Tolkien mentions in the posthumous apocrypha. The results were also compared against Tolkien's descriptions of locations as summarised in the Atlas and found to provide a good match.
Using the results of the model, it was possible to match specific places in Middle Earth with similar locations on Earth. These showed that the Shire was most like Lincolnshire or Leicestershire — and that, climate-wise, the films would have been better using a location close to Dunedin rather than North Island. Mordor, amusingly, was found to match well with both Los Angeles and parts of West Texas, as well was Alice Springs in Australia. The work was published on the web and summaries of it appeared in various newspapers. Thanks to the magic of LaTeX, it was possible to display it both in dwarvern runes and elvish characters; no attempt was made to convert into proper language by the authors, but someone on the internet has since translated the abstract into genuine elvish!
The presentation concluded with some comments on terrestrial climate models and the strength of their predictions for the future. As might be expected, the results are not good: current projections indicate that we're heading for the worst case IPCC prediction with 1,000 ppm of CO2 by the end of the century, with the possibility of 10 degree rises at the poles and six degrees in the UK — in contrast, the last ice age was triggered by a global average temperature decrease of four degrees.
As a final aside, Lunt noted that following the publicity of his Tolkien work, he'd received a number of requests from authors with maps who were eager to repeat the project with their world. He was interested in the idea of building a simple tool that could be used to do this, but didn't have the time to do it himself...
Since the presentation touched on something related to my chosen profession, I made a point of going up and saying hello afterwards — not difficult because it was a fun bit of work and I've been to enough climate presentations over the years that I don't sound completely clueless.
I also got talking to one of the book sellers who, it transpired, had studied palaeo-climatology and had applied for a summer internship with the Hadley Centre and was keen join our happy little band...
