ArtOfAnrach on DeviantArthttps://www.deviantart.com/artofanrach/art/Plant-Planet-583200166ArtOfAnrach

Deviation Actions

ArtOfAnrach's avatar

Plant Planet

By
Published:
6.4K Views

Description

This planet is designated NMG-977 b and is of particular interest to scientists due to it's unusual biosphere and habitable surface. No significant body of water can be found on the surface, only a few small ponds and creeks in isolated areas, but dry riverbeds and basins suggest this was not always the case. The planet's hydrosphere is supported instead by giant swaths of jungle-like areas hosting a variety of plant analogues. The planet may have been more habitable at one time but at some point experienced a significant loss of surface water from some unknown event in its distant past. The larger areas of jungle and forest seem to have survived by unintentionally supporting each other through transpiration. Water vapor released from the leaves of the plants rise into the atmosphere to form clouds that carry the water vapor to other areas and eventually come down as rain. Smaller pockets of plant life have developed niches around runoff from this rain, though it seems nearly all the life on the planet is congregated in areas where atmospheric conditions produce regular, monsoon-like rainfall from the released water vapor. Interestingly there appears to be no animal life as we know it anywhere on the planet. Presumably the animal life either never had time to adapt to land before the surface water was lost or otherwise died out soon after. This has opened up unlikely evolutionary possibilities such as species of mobile, nomadic plants that migrate between water sources in the arid outskirts of the jungles and the predatory parasitic mobile plants that hunt them. The planet has been designated as an areas of scientific interest and has been removed from potential colony status, though there are plans to create a few manned research outposts in the uninhabited regions of the planet and in orbit. The possibility of using the native plant life of NMG-977 to increase the habitability of arid colony worlds and the use of some of the mobile plants as livestock are at the forefront of the intended research goals but there is also interest in examining an animal-less biosphere and the cause of the sudden loss of surface water.
Image size
2600x1980px 1.92 MB
© 2016 - 2024 ArtOfAnrach
Comments10
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In
Changeling209458's avatar
In short: No smoking.