The Broken Arm and Global Climate Change

[Lord Vance II]

Just want to start off saying this theory has little if any impact on the story of the books, it's just something that bothers me. 

I, like many of you I'm sure, have spent an inordinate amount of time staring at the world map. Something that has raised a lot of questions for me is the Stepstones, the remains of an ancient land bridge that the First Men used to cross from Essos to Westeros. The Children of the Forest used their magic to shatter the land bridge to try to stop the First Men's onslaught, but obviously failed. 

It's important to note that, except for the obvious exception of the seasons, nature on the ASoIaF earth seems to work just like it does on our earth. 

The thing that bothers me about the ancient land bridge is how much impact it would have on the climate of Westeros and Essos. I'm not an oceanographer or climatologist, but I believe an intact land bridge would have made areas to the north extremely cold to the point of rendering it unlivable by preventing any type of warm current up the Narrow sea from the south. This would have created a far-reaching ice sheet across the Shivering Sea and extensive glaciers on both continents.

For starters, there is plenty of evidence that there is a warm-water current running up the narrow sea in the books. The most blatant is the weather, particularly Shipbreaker Bay. Warm, energy-rich water from the Summer Sea and the accompanying air creating massive storms (which we would call hurricanes) that come up the Narrow Sea and hit against Westeros. Essentially, this is the same thing that happens in real life on the U.S. East Coast, where warm water from the equator pulled north by the North Atlantic Current create hurricanes, while the same current keeps Europe warmer than it should be. 

That warm water current would travel up the Narrow Sea into the Shivering sea, where it cools down, but not before bringing warmth to both coasts and into the north. I have no idea what that would mean as far as temperature, but I think it could easily create a double-digit difference. 

But roughly 10,000 years before ASoIaF, the intact arm would have prevented all of this. The Narrow Sea and the western Shivering Sea would be stagnant with no flow from the warm Summer Sea. This would mean the ice on the Shivering sea could have extended much farther south, maybe as far as Ibb, if not farther. It could also mean much of the Westrosi east coast would be locked in ice as well, maybe as far down at The Bite, maybe more. (Basically, The Day after Tomorrow without being hollywooded up). It could also lead to a North covered in glaciers. 

Evidence of extensive glaciation in the North can be found in the topography. Most of the North is low, rolling hills and cold meadows, dotted with lakes. These are evidence of a land ground smooth by glaciers, like the northern Midwest in the U.S., which was shaped by the Ice Ages. The lakes in particular, like the Long Lake and the lake by Torrhen's Square are evidence of (relatively) rapid melting of a glacier. The only real terrain is in the northwest corner, which would be up against the Sunset sea, which presumably would not have been effected by the shattered arm. Northwestern Essos is also devoid of real rough terrain, having the same rolling hills.  

If the water current theory is true, it's likely no one would even know it happened. It took hundreds, if not thousands of years for the First Men to work their way up from Dorne to areas that would have been greatly warmed by the new current. So by the time they got there, it would have been a similar climate to what it is now. On Earth, the last Ice Age in North America ended about 11,000 years ago, a pretty similar time frame from the breaking of the Arm to the present. 

TL;DR

When the Children of the Forest shattered the Arm, they unknowingly (or maybe knowingly) allowed warm water from the Summer Sea to flow up the Narrow Sea, creating a convection current similar to the North Atlantic Current that runs along the U.S. East Coast to Europe. Evidence for the current can be found in the strong hurricanes that form in the sea and hit Shipbreaker Bay. This Narrow Sea current had the potential to have warmed the Shivering Sea by double-digit degrees, rolling back the ice sheet and bringing enough warmth to the North to melt glaciers and make it livable, if not comfortable. Evidence for the glaciers can be found in the topography of the North and Andalos. The slow progress of the First Men up the continent would mean by the time they reached the North it could have already been as it is today. 

Again, I don't think this would have a lot of impact on the story, except possibly ending the golden age of the Others when ice and snow prevailed much farther to the south. 

Thoughts?

 

[daccu65]

Interesting theory.  If I remember some of the reading I have done about Earth's climate, several Geologists claim that prior to the formation of the Isthmus of Panama, Earth's climate was much more tropical.  Sort of an opposite action...forming a land bridge bringing on an ice age as opposed to removing one.  

Perhaps this also explains the dying off of the mammoths and the giants.  These are clearly cold-weather species and might not adapt well to a warmer climate.  Didn't Leaf refer to the giants as "our bane and our brothers"?  Perhaps this is a source of major guilt for the COF, in trying to protect themselves by shattering the land bridge, they doomed the giants.

 

[daccu65]

Sorry to post twice, but another possible impact of the story could have to do when the COF attempted it again, around The Neck.  During this attempt, they didn't manage to break the land, but turned it into a swamp.  Perhaps after causing the environmental damage with their last use of The Hammer of the Waters, they couldn't bring themselves to utilize their magic to its full strength the second time.

 

[talvikorppi]

Thank you, Lord Vance II, for this interesting topic.

For a while I've been looking at the Planetos map and wondering why would there be such violent autumn storms in the Narrow Sea, especially around Shipbreaker Bay. To my untrained eye, it'd look like the Stepstones would break the worst violence of the storms before they got any further north. Your idea of cold/warm waters and air clashing makes sense.

I think your suggested parallel with east coast U.S. also makes sense, as GRRM is an east coast U.S. native and would be familiar with weather patterns there. Me, I'm in Europe, and we look at the same weather systems from a different angle. The Gulf Stream keeps us warm but the remnants of hurricanes hit us, with cold Arctic air added. And the storms always come from the west.

For an unrelated reason, I was today refreshing my knowledge on terminal moraines that form at the edge of melting glaciers (I live on one and it's the reason we tend to have more snow than places only 5,  10, 20 km away), which led me on to an internet trip on more info on glacier-formed topography. I'd learned most of the basics in school, especially as regards my country, but refreshing that knowledge as an adult with a broader understanding and a global scope was a nice experience. Then I come here, and somebody is talking about the very thing!

I agree, much of the landscape (topography) of the North in Westeros is described as post-glacial, similar to post-glacial landscapes in Scandinavia, Scotland, parts of North America.

I don't know how well-versed GRRM is on all this but he must possess at least the same general knowledge that I do, he's an educated man. It's nice noticing these similarities. Planetos is not just all magic and fantasy but grounded in laws of nature as they apply in our universe, which makes it more believable and accesible to us readers.

Thank you again for the interesting topic, and I hope many more contribute - are you familiar with the work LmL has done on the astronomy/climate of Planetos? I've read a couple of his essays, and they're very impressive and interesting, but a bit heavy-duty for me, who enjoys ASOIAF as an intermittent distraction from the daily grind.

I don't know how to search for and post links in the middle of writing my own reply but I'll come back with a link to LmL's work, it might be something you might find interesting.

[Lady Fishbiscuit]

Thanks OP and reply posters - interesting stuff!

I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on what additional effect the volcanic activity would have on the sea temps and climate? We know there is volcanic activity at Winterfell and I believe its hinted of at Hardhome on the coast too.

[talvikorppi]

To the OP, here's the first link I found to LmL's work, maybe find out more, follow from there?

Yes, he mixes it with a lot of "magic" and "history of the elder days" and "prophecy" but there's a lot of interesting stuff there.

@ Lady Fisbiscuit. I just think about Iceland and how much their volcanic activity warms the North Sea... Not very much, I think. Maybe keeps the limit of regularly frozen sea a bit further north? Hard to separate from the effects of the Gulf Stream.

The Gulf Stream lets palms (not native, planted) grow in northwest Scotland, and protects Scandinavia and the Baltic countries from the Siberian (Arctic) blast from the east. Our climates are much warmer than they should be, given our latitude. North American or Asian locations at 60'38" are much harsher and colder.

[Veloknight]

I really like this thread!

One thing that strikes me is that, if this pushed glaciers much further north, this would give a certain ice-loving species a really good reason to be angry at the CoTF and the First Men, since they've lost a sizeable kingdom. It would also suggest possible further connections between the Arm times and the Last Hero.

[daccu65]

6 minutes ago, Veloknight said:

I really like this thread!

One thing that strikes me is that, if this pushed glaciers much further north, this would give a certain ice-loving species a really good reason to be angry at the CoTF and the First Men, since they've lost a sizeable kingdom. It would also suggest possible further connections between the Arm times and the Last Hero.

Perhaps that's a reason for the Others to be heading south!  They want to reach the straights where the land bridge used to be, and utilize magic to reform it! 

[talvikorppi]

44 minutes ago, daccu65 said:

Perhaps that's a reason for the Others to be heading south!  They want to reach the straights where the land bridge used to be, and utilize magic to reform it! 

Oh, I'm loving this! The Others are hoping to manipulate the climate on Planetos to be favourable to them, and who can argue with that? Except (us) humans, who need a milder climate to grow our crops to survive.

What do the Other's eat, anyway? Snow? Craster's sons? Cold wind? What? I want to know!

[Veloknight]

1 hour ago, talvikorppi said:

Oh, I'm loving this! The Others are hoping to manipulate the climate on Planetos to be favourable to them, and who can argue with that? Except (us) humans, who need a milder climate to grow our crops to survive.

What do the Other's eat, anyway? Snow? Craster's sons? Cold wind? What? I want to know!

There's so much that I'm worried we'll never learn about them, because it might spoil the mystery. Really hope we get more books on the world.

It also gives the Others a reason to be so cruel and - pun intended - cold. Even if they are perfectly nice to each "Other", this would make the conflict between them and Men/CoTF existential and elemental, which means that complete annihilation is the order of the day for either side.

[daccu65]

How about this for adding climate change to the Others' reason for coming south?

 

 

When the oldest of us first emerged from the comforting ice that sheltered us from the heat and light of the sun, we knew very little about this world. We only knew that the sun harmed us and the ice sheltered us. With this sliver of lore, we set out to learn of the world.

 

One of the first things we learned, was that the world was divided between land and water and that the deep waters of the seas and oceans was death to us. At this time, we did not understand why, we only understood that it was. We also learned that we could survive exposure to the sun for a time, absorbing the light and heat it emits...but we would eventually need to return to the deep ice to sleep and allow the ice to purge us of the energies the sun inflicted upon us.

 

We continued to search our world, finding ocean beneath the ice to the very far north but finding something of even more interest to the south...other beings that we called the children of the sun. From observing the children we learned both of them and ourselves. We learned that the children came in two forms; those who moved and those who didn't. Those who didn't move sunk roots into the earth, and used the heat and light of the sun to grow. Those who moved consumed either those who didn't move, or others who moved. In any case, the children of the sun are dependent upon the sun, filling themselves with an energy that we call life. We also learned that our strength, our own form of life, is dependent upon the slow trickle of energy, be it light, heat or life, through our own bodies.

 

Always remember this, such energies are both our nourishment and our bane. The slow flow of energy through us to the endless ice gives strength and movement to our forms, but too much breaks the bonds that hold us together. It was at this time, shortly after encountering the children of the sun for the first time, that we realized why the oceans held death for us...they are the embodiment of energy and motion, even as we are the embodiment of cold eternity.

 

As time went by, we realized that most of the children of the sun were mortal...they came into being, aged and died with the passage of time. To counter this, they had the ability to reproduce themselves. We also realized that the mobile children had varying degrees of intelligence...some of whom even matched our own. At roughly the time we learned of the seasons, the endless cycle of winter and summer, we also learned that we could use certain of the sunlings to reproduce our own kind. We learned to take the young of two certain types of the sunlings, those we now call the giants and the children of the forest. By shaping the very spirit of eternity, and exposing these young to the deepest glaciers, where unending cold and dark ground against eternal stone, we could infuse these young with the embodiment of eternity and thus replace those of us who we had lost to mishap over the years. We were amazed that the sunlings opposed these efforts.

 

Even though long ages have passed, this still puzzles me. The sunlings are doomed to age and die so when we take them for whichever purpose, we only expedite the inevitable. The reason they oppose us does not matter; only the fact that they do so. The giants fought us with their great strength while the children of the forest fought us with magic and skill. The Children of the Forest learned to build weapons of dragonglass while we learned to form implements from the densest ice at the base of the thickest glaciers. With such implements, we contested with the other sentients.

 

When winter came onto the land, we would move south into the areas where such folk lived and take such of their young as we could. When the seasons changed and became warmer, we retreated to the north, where the cold always held sway. In the back and forth we learned still more; we learned that we lived continent that was joined to another down in the lands to the south that were always warm. We also learned that we could also absorb the life of the sunlings, making them rise again as our servants, even though it hastened the time in which we needed to return to our sleep under the ice. Not long after we learned we could raise fallen sunlings as thralls, a new form of sentient began to cross onto our continent.

 

I could describe how these children of the sun differed from the previous, but that is a tale for another season. The important issue is that these new sunlings contested with the previous. In the course of the struggle, the Children of the Forest used powerful magic and shattered the land bridge that connected our continent from the other. At first, we did not see the implications of this act; we were content to continue as before, taking such sunlings we could, either to create thralls or more of our own. Centuries passed before we noted that the seasons were changing in intensity.

 

The opening of the seaway to the south allowed a current of warm water to flow up the east shore of our continent. While the seasons continued to march as before, this current made the climate warmer. As the centuries marched on, areas of tundra gave way to plains, ice fields gave way to tundra. Even some of the great glacier where we could either sleep or create more of our kind were lost to the expanding warm lands. The new sunlings, who lived shorter lives than the others and could thus reproduce more quickly, moved into the lands opening up to them. In return, we performed a foolish act.

 

We attacked the sunlings. In our arrogance, we looked at them as prey and not as rivals. Since we did not fight among ourselves, we had no concept of a fragile peace strengthened by an outside threat. When we attacked the sunlings, the Children of the Forest, the giants, and the men joined forces against us. Even so, it was a long and near thing.

 

Telling tales of the battle accomplish nothing, in the end, we lost and retreated farther to the north while the sunlings raised a great wall to keep us and our servants from their lands. While cycles of cold and warm continued to follow each other, the climate along the east coast continued to become slowly warmer. A forest even grew north of the wall, where once we were able to sleep beneath the ice. However, we learned our lesson and realized that we cannot simply attack the sunlings, we needed to combat them. We retreated to the north, to increase our numbers and hone our powers of cold.

 

Now is perhaps a good time to point out that the sunlings can easily outnumber us. The area each of them needs to produce the energy they call food is much less than the area each of us require to sleep and disperse our accumulated energy. Because of this, we realized that we could not overcome them in a pitched struggle. We needed to take advantages of our strengths and find a way to reclaim the territories we had lost.

 

Most of us went beneath the ice to bide their time until the time to act had arrived. Some remained, learning the art of creating the cold blocks; masses of the most dense ice that could absorb light and heat for years. Still a few more stole south every time winter returned to the land, taking such of the sunlings that we could without alerting the rest. For centuries now, the plan appears to have worked. The sunlings, who age and die, have forgotten us. However, we must strike soon, before our preparations are complete.

 

I have learned that the seaway to the south is expanding. Not only has the warm current brought warmth to much of the eastern continent, erosion has expanded it, wearing islands in the channel. The warm current is growing, threatening to thaw still more of the lands we need to sustain ourselves. Winter is coming, and we must rise and strike when it does.

 

When winter comes, we will waken our sleeping kin, gather up our thralls and the cold blocks and march south. The first step will be to assault the sunlings found north of their wall, to raise many more thralls to bear all of the cold blocks we have created. We shall then follow the advancing cold to the wall, where we shall defeat its defenders and breach it, allowing us to move still further south.

 

The cold blocks will shelter us as we march further south than we have ever been, to the seaway that allows the warm current through. Once there, the blocks will freeze the sea, forming a wall of ice from this continent to the other and choking off the warm current. We are ice incarnate, if the sunlings can raise a wall of ice, we can do even better.

 

The struggle will be long and hard. Once we form the ice dam, we will need to leave a force in place, sheltered by the waning cold blocks, while the rest of us retreat back to the north to once again marshal our strength. Every winter, we will need to march south again, to reinforce those we leave on the ice dam. We will suffer losses, but those losses won't be in vain. Without the warm current, our continent will grow colder again. With each passing century, we will be able to move our claims farther to the south. Eventually, the continent will once again be ours.

 

 

 

 

[Maester of Valyria]

On 26/02/2016 at 5:02 PM, talvikorppi said:

To the OP, here's the first link I found to LmL's work, maybe find out more, follow from there?

Yes, he mixes it with a lot of "magic" and "history of the elder days" and "prophecy" but there's a lot of interesting stuff there.

@ Lady Fisbiscuit. I just think about Iceland and how much their volcanic activity warms the North Sea... Not very much, I think. Maybe keeps the limit of regularly frozen sea a bit further north? Hard to separate from the effects of the Gulf Stream.

The Gulf Stream lets palms (not native, planted) grow in northwest Scotland, and protects Scandinavia and the Baltic countries from the Siberian (Arctic) blast from the east. Our climates are much warmer than they should be, given our latitude. North American or Asian locations at 60'38" are much harsher and colder.

We know that the Far North is volcanic, at least in places. Thenn shows the Frostfangs to be a volcanic mountain range, there are liquid water lakes in the Lands of Always Winter, and I believe there is a volcano at Hardhome.

 

On 26/02/2016 at 5:54 PM, daccu65 said:

Perhaps that's a reason for the Others to be heading south!  They want to reach the straights where the land bridge used to be, and utilize magic to reform it! 

The Others' very presence over the planet's surface cools the world. As they move out over more and more of the world's land, the world will cool even more. By the time they reach the Arm, or even maybe the Neck, enough water will have been locked up in the polar ice caps for the land bridge to re-emerge from the sea.

 

On 26/02/2016 at 8:11 PM, Veloknight said:

There's so much that I'm worried we'll never learn about them, because it might spoil the mystery. Really hope we get more books on the world.

It also gives the Others a reason to be so cruel and - pun intended - cold. Even if they are perfectly nice to each "Other", this would make the conflict between them and Men/CoTF existential and elemental, which means that complete annihilation is the order of the day for either side.

You might be interested in a theory I'm working on: there's a very rough and incomplete version in my signature.

 

18 hours ago, daccu65 said:

How about this for adding climate change to the Others' reason for coming south?

<snip>

 

You sir, are a genius. Thank you for this.

[talvikorppi]

The quoting function seems to be playing up so I can't quote you, Daccu65, above, but thank you so much for your brilliant POV of the Others! It has me rooting for them!

I especially love your neologism, sunling, to describe life-forms we in this world would consider normal. But it's true, we're all sun-dependant.

Poor, innocent Puddles, so cruelly murdered by that fat sunling with sun-rock.

[talvikorppi]

On 26.2.2016 at 10:11 PM, Veloknight said:

There's so much that I'm worried we'll never learn about them, because it might spoil the mystery. Really hope we get more books on the world.

It also gives the Others a reason to be so cruel and - pun intended - cold. Even if they are perfectly nice to each "Other", this would make the conflict between them and Men/CoTF existential and elemental, which means that complete annihilation is the order of the day for either side.

Haha, love how you slipped in "perfectly nice to each 'Other'".

However, I don't agree with the part I bolded. It's huge and important, I grant you that, even existential... But is complete annihilation really the only answer?

It seems that the previous major conflict, the Long Night - important enough to be remembered 8000 years later by humans - between our kind of life-forms and the Others ended in some kind of a truce or pact. It definitely did not end in complete annihilation on either side because men prosper, CotF still exist, the Others are back. Has the old pact been broken? How? Can a new pact be made? A new pact that would allow the Others and sunlings (hat tip to Daccu65 for the term!) to live in peace?

The Others clearly aren't human, or any life-as-we-know-it. How does a human try to penetrate, to understand, an alien intelligence? I can't even fathom what's going through my cat's mind, and she's at least a familiar, warm-blooded life form!

I love the theories in this tread that the Others just want to restore conditions favourable to their kind, which means blocking the Arm/Stepstones to block the influx of warm seawater, which warms the climate. I have to admit, though, as a human, I hope they'll be unsuccessful.

A final note. Our Earth world is known to have several ice ages (Long nights?). The modern human species emerged during the last one. Some moved north, evolved into Homo neardenthalis, some moved further east, Denisovans, Peking men, Home florensiensis ("the Hobbit"), whatever. Later, during an interglacial (=milder period) fully modern humans moved out of Africa and into middle east and Europe. The still prevalent stories of trolls in the folklore of any and every European country could be remnants of fireside stories of encounters between the natives (neanderthals) and our kind.

DNA analysis by Svante Pääbo and his team have now proved that all Europeans have a bit of Neanderthal DNA. Did Homo sapiens men rape Neanderthal women? Or make babies with them out of love? Did neandethal women seek to sleep with the taller, slimmer, "hotter" men? How come we rarely consider modern human women sleeping with Neanderthal men? Did they peacefully intermarry? Anyway, they lived together in Europe during the last high glaciation. By they time the ice age was over, it was our kind, Homo sapiens, that was only left, and they moved into newly ice-free environments, like Britain or Scandinavia.

[Lord Vance II]

The Arm would have been broken hundreds, if not thousands of years before the Long Night, so if it was an ice age (which is possible) it would have had to have a different cause.

I think possibly the Long Night was a final gambit of sorts by the Others, using all of their ice magic to plunge the North into an Ice Age to give them their chance to regain control. When they Last Hero defeated them, they withdrew, magic depleted, to wait for another shot (which is apparently coming.) But, of course, we don't really know jack as far a details about the Others powers though. 

Or it could have been caused by a completely different natural reason. We today still don't know the exact reason for the real Ice Ages, but it's attributed to the complicated dynamics of solar output, continental position and, of course, ocean currents. Maybe somewhere else on the globe a current was halted on the eastern end of the Shivering Sea. No real way to know. 

And if closing the Broken Arm is a goal of the others, it would mean a TON. First, they would have to understand the dynamics involved and somehow know it happened thousands of miles away where, as far as we know, they have no access or knowledge of. It would mean they've been planning for millennia. It also means they're willing to cut through thousands of miles, tens of thousands of people, and somehow pass through the desert of Dorne (the opposite of the Land of Always Winter) to accomplish this. AND have a plan for closing the gap (freezing I assume, but on an enormous scale). Personally, I almost want to say the Others have chocked the situation up as a loss that could be fixed if their other mysterious goals are accomplished. 

Also, for the record, I don't think volcanism has anything to do with any of this. It may not seem like it, but water is takes a ton of energy to warm. Even a massive eruption would be equivalent to taking a blowtorch to the corner of a swimming pool. The only eruption I could see as being that impactful would be the destruction of Valyria, but that would have been more due to the massive amount of debris shot into the atmosphere and not ocean warming. 

Love the enthusiasm in this thread. 

[daccu65]

17 hours ago, talvikorppi said:

It seems that the previous major conflict, the Long Night - important enough to be remembered 8000 years later by humans - between our kind of life-forms and the Others ended in some kind of a truce or pact. It definitely did not end in complete annihilation on either side because men prosper, CotF still exist, the Others are back. Has the old pact been broken? How? Can a new pact be made?

I'm wondering if GRRM is drawing from a certain event in Europe from 1914 to 1918.  If I remember my history correctly, the French/British forces (with other allies) were so worn out from the struggle that they agreed to an armistice, rather than pushing on for a decisive military victory.  Later on, someone built this big wall on the border...

 

Could that have been what happened during the Battle for the Dawn?  The first men and their allies had the victory, but it came at such a cost that they looked at an invasion of the lands of always winter as suicide?  Rather than continue the fight to either a complete victory, or at least to the point where the others had to make a decisive concession, the exhausted, victorious first men retreated to their own realm and built a wall on the border. 

[Lord Vance II]

I think it's a lot less dramatic than that. Maybe as they pushed up they just saw that it wasn't getting any warmer so they just kind of said "screw it, good enough" and put up the wall. I think it's worth noting that the Wall is pretty much as far north as any human would live by choice. North of the wall wouldn't be worth fighting for. Also, I don't think the Other could be "brought to the table" to negotiate. 

(Also, side note, Germany pushed for the armistice, not the western allies. Germany made a last-ditch offensive to try to win before a million fresh Americans arrived in Europe. It worked, but not well enough, American troops swung the tide and Germany sued for peace rather than get decimated by the inevitable counter-attack spearheaded by fresh Americans. The 2 million German soldiers marching back in good order after the war helped fuel the "someone sabotaged the war effort" talk even before Hitler came and blamed the Jews.)

[Maester of Valyria]

5 hours ago, Lord Vance II said:

Also, for the record, I don't think volcanism has anything to do with any of this. It may not seem like it, but water is takes a ton of energy to warm. Even a massive eruption would be equivalent to taking a blowtorch to the corner of a swimming pool. The only eruption I could see as being that impactful would be the destruction of Valyria, but that would have been more due to the massive amount of debris shot into the atmosphere and not ocean warming. 

Love the enthusiasm in this thread. 

I believe the supervolcano under the polar ice cap to be at least as powerful as the Fourteen Flames' chain of volcanoes. It's possible that the volcano is simply large and powerful enough to keep the temperature of the sea in some areas slightly above freezing, and that the legends of a 'warm summer sea' deep in the White Waste is a fabrication or an exaggeration. Alternatively, perhaps the Children augmented the volcano with their magic?

[daccu65]

36 minutes ago, Lord Vance II said:

I think it's a lot less dramatic than that. Maybe as they pushed up they just saw that it wasn't getting any warmer so they just kind of said "screw it, good enough" and put up the wall. I think it's worth noting that the Wall is pretty much as far north as any human would live by choice. North of the wall wouldn't be worth fighting for. Also, I don't think the Other could be "brought to the table" to negotiate. 

(Also, side note, Germany pushed for the armistice, not the western allies. Germany made a last-ditch offensive to try to win before a million fresh Americans arrived in Europe. It worked, but not well enough, American troops swung the tide and Germany sued for peace rather than get decimated by the inevitable counter-attack spearheaded by fresh Americans. The 2 million German soldiers marching back in good order after the war helped fuel the "someone sabotaged the war effort" talk even before Hitler came and blamed the Jews.)

To be honest, that's what I was thinking myself.  I probably worded things poorly.  The parallel I'm thinking of is between the 2 million German soldiers marching back in good order and the Others retreating back to the north.  In the European case, the British/French/American/Italian...(not trying to insult anyone by leaving them out) leaders looked at the situation and weighed marching into Germany to inflict a massive defeat on the enemy against the multiple thousands of casualties it would cost and decided that the cost wasn't worth the benefit.  As a result, the sabotaged war effort theory was able to take root. 

Contrast this to the Others.  What I read of the Long Night, they invaded the lands held by the First Men, COF and the Giants.  After making initial gains, they were driven back...but their 'homeland' wasn't invaded.  Therefore, they might consider themselves not as having lost the conflict...but rather as having not won it.  A minor quibble, I know, but one that might spur them to think that they could do better next time.

Of course, now I'm getting way off the original topic...sorry about that.

 

 

 

[Veloknight]

19 hours ago, talvikorppi said:

Well, truce or no truce, I would argue the results are by definition going to be very one-sided, which makes it essentially existential. If the Others really need Winter to survive and they want to spread their kind of icy world further south, human populations will be by necessity greatly reduced, and I suspect that the Other population is similarly reduced by their being cooped up north. My basic argument is that a given climate, there can be kingdoms of men, or kingdoms of Others, and since they want to cool the climate overall, there will be many regions in which kingdoms of men simply cannot exist as anything other than small bands similar to the Wildlings.

6 hours ago, Lord Vance II said:

The Arm would have been broken hundreds, if not thousands of years before the Long Night, so if it was an ice age (which is possible) it would have had to have a different cause.

I'm not a climatologist, but wouldn't a gradual process over centuries be somewhat expected? Perhaps the Others have resealed the Arm before, causing what is remembered as the Long Night?

6 hours ago, Lord Vance II said:

It also means they're willing to cut through thousands of miles, tens of thousands of people, and somehow pass through the desert of Dorne (the opposite of the Land of Always Winter) to accomplish this. AND have a plan for closing the gap (freezing I assume, but on an enormous scale).

Not necessarily. Deserts are defined by aridity, not temperature. Even many equatorial deserts get quite cold at night, and there are plenty of tundra areas that receive little to no precipitation. I'm not sure how they'll cool the desert, but maybe they plan on moving through the night and hiding underground during the day?

6 hours ago, Lord Vance II said:

Personally, I almost want to say the Others have chocked the situation up as a loss that could be fixed if their other mysterious goals are accomplished. 

Also, for the record, I don't think volcanism has anything to do with any of this. It may not seem like it, but water is takes a ton of energy to warm. Even a massive eruption would be equivalent to taking a blowtorch to the corner of a swimming pool. The only eruption I could see as being that impactful would be the destruction of Valyria, but that would have been more due to the massive amount of debris shot into the atmosphere and not ocean warming. 

Love the enthusiasm in this thread. 

Thought: Volcanism can be a tool for the Others as much as it is for anyone else. If there is a supervolcanic hot spot under the Lands of Always Winter, triggering a large eruption could lead to a huge fallout winter. If they knew when the 'natural' length of winters (caused, I suppose, by a more pronounced tilt of the planet) would be longest, they could plan to make their move, seize territory and thralls and possibly sacrifices, then trigger an eruption, keeping the land enmeshed in winter for generations. If nothing else, this should completely decimate the population of humans and CoTF, which would give them time to do Other things.