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I've read through all of the books I have but I don't see anything about how much the sea level went up. Looking at the various maps it doesn't look
like a massive amount.

Cheers!

Well, they went up pretty far indeed, actually.

For example: the entire city of Tokyo is underwater currently. That would mean the water would have to have risen to a height of 58.79 meters / 192.8 feet in order to cover the farthest eastern district of Tokyo, the ward of Suginami. Additionally, in order to do this, the waters would have to have traveled inland a distance of 25km / 15.5 miles.

That's a pretty huge increase in volume, don't ya think?

There are many other cities just like this all over the world. Also, a pretty good chuck of Flordia is underwater, too. The inland sea in the middle of Austraila is a fairly solid example as well, I would think.

Well if you look at South America One you can get a pretty good look at what the sea levels did to the Amazon river and how that effected that part of the continent. As for Europe and NA well keep in mind that you don't have to venture TOO far from the coast line to get a couple of hundred meters above sea level (200 meters really isn't as far as many think, it's only about 700 feet and really not that high in the grand scheme of things). Coastal cities are total more from Tsunamis and the likes at the Cataclysms outset. Places like Florida (As L/S already pointed out) are largely underwater. Let us remember the nuclear winter and short ice age of sorts that would have occurred as well. The polar Ice Caps are likely larger than prior to the cataclysm and the only real thing that would have changed sea levels is Atlantis, not to mention there was tectonic upheaval during the cataclysm too (Just see Madhaven as a sample). Also in Australia's case, the inland sea is because once you get past the coast, iirc, Australia actually drops belows sea level so any super tsunamis etc would have washed over or washed out a portion of the coast to allow it to be filled in.

Hopefully I have shown that seas did rise quite a bit even if the maps don't seem to show it quite as well as you may like.

According to the RMB (and I guess RUE though I haven't checked), high enough to cover the highest point in Delaware, but low enough to not cover the highest point in Florida.

That sounds like a description of Bill Clinton's pants...

years back when a bunch of us were working on the FNB project, some of us crunched numbers and compared maps, and worked out that the average sealevel increase was about 150ft. though in some areas it was higher, in others it was lower. a few spots had negative sealevel rise (like manhattan)
thus we concluded that while the oceans rose roughly 150ft, there were tectonic shifts involved that made some areas rise and fall.. mostly so we didn't have to tear our hair out over discrepancies, but now that we've gotten info on the catclysm itself in chaos Earth, this view has some justification. after all, so many volcanos and earthquakes going off at once is going to drastically effect the crustal plates. add in some of the dimensional weirdness and you can excuse just about anything.

Indeed, and if you look at research on predicting/projecting the rise of sea levels on our Earth they point out that sea levels don't rise uniformly around the world for a complex array of reasons, but even our non-supercharged tectonics play a part in that.
Even before Chaos Earth we've been told about the major tectonic events and shown a few examples, like the New Rockies and St. Peter's Spine. The latter indicating higher pressure likely raising the Eurasian continent and, along with distance from the equator, helping keep the region dryer.
Looking at England, I surmise the ancient rifts (not the dimensional kind) to have reactivated a bit, more firmly separating the Isles from the continental plate raise, explaining the water levels there being comparable to the rise seen in the Americas while nearby Europe is remarkably dry in comparison.

Right after the Cataclysm, as Atlantis and its continental shelf slammed back into this plane of reality (Atlantis),



is right with massive tsunamis flattening a lot of the world's coastlines, including everyone in the US chain of command (Rifter 47, "Fall of NORAD"). (Presumably New York was specially protected by whatever tectonic/interdimensional uplift created a land bridge between Jersey, Staten Is., and Long Is.)

But after that you've got massive volcanism including (A) Yellowstone burying the US's west coast in 6-odd feet of ash (Chaos Earth), followed by (B) more volcanoes and/or dimensional issues burying the West in another 50-odd feet of dirt (Rifts Ultimate Ed.)—presumably capping the Golden Gate and letting Cali's Central Valley dry out instead of becoming a bay the way it should have (cf. the map from After the Bomb's Road Hogs)—and creating a new volcanic range in Russia (Warlords of Russia), followed by (C) an 80-odd year little ice age that presumably pulled a few dozen feet worth of ocean into glaciers and the ice caps. (D) The rest of any discrepancy can be handwaved by remembering that you've got 6 magic triangles and abundant lesser nexuses all over the ocean, able to rift water and/or islands in or out from other planes as needed. There hasn't been a Rifts New Zealand afaik but it looks like they opted not to raise its former continent (Lemuria).

You can actually see this process in the maps in China I: right after the Cataclysm, the ocean swallowed up everything to the point that Shandong was an island and the hills around Wuhan were seafront property but circa 110 PA even the Shanghai peninsula is back above water. There, at least, you've got the excuse that the kings of the Chinese hells had remits for particular provinces and presumably used their living and undead subjects for massive amounts of land reclamation.

Really, what happened was that you had writers without access to the online cartographic tools we have today. Some, like the original book or the Russian team, did the best they could and wove geological changes into the storytelling itself; others, like Wujcik, nodded in its direction but then put most of the land back the way it was; others, like the Australian team, completely ignored it (cf. the more sensible Mutants Down Under) in favor of the Rule of Cool; and others like the New West team just completely ignored it for no apparent reason whatever, despite it being essential to the setting and cooler than what they did. (At the very least, I can't find anything about Yellowstone or deeply submerged cities in those two books, despite it having already been canon.)

Tl;dr: The sea level rose dramatically at first but lots of secondary effects dropped it to 60' or less in most places. There are some things that still don't really make any sense (Australia's inland sea, Lemuria's treatment of the Indian and Indochinese coastlines) but you can handwave them (rift effects, geological subsidence, problems with the Deccan Traps). You can poke around in the books for the canon maps of the area you're interested in or just come up with the coastline most interesting to you for the region you're playing.

If it helps, there is a little tool that can guess at the effects of sea level rise on the current world map -
http://flood.firetree.net/

So higher than 447 feet, but lower than 345 feet?

Since that doesn't make sense, I think we have to assume that during the Golden Age some major restructuring occurred. Like perhaps Britton Hill was built up higher, or Ebright Azimuth was nuked and became lower?



Can we estimate how much extra water would be needed to make ocean levels rise that much? At bare minimum it would be the added height multiplied by the current surface area occupied by water on earth...

Actually slightly more, since you would also have to account for water which would also cover the new surface area that was previously land.

If we could calculate the surface area of Atlantis, and divide the "minimum required volume" by that number, I think this would allow us to estimate the height of the submerged portion of the island of Atlantis.

That would be interesting to know. Just how far down would you have to dive before you reached the water under the continent?

Where does it say Atlantis is Floating? Contenents don't float. It goes all the way to the bedrock under the Ocean Floor.

Atlantis does not float. It's one if the reasons for water levels rising and tectonic activity that altered parts of some coastlines it's at least 12000 feet in depth being the middle of the Atlantic.

Page 8 mentions "island continent" which might be oxymoronic, the wikipedia article for "island" defines it as "sub-continental" for example.

Still does not mean it floats. Islands do not float.

Okay? Islands don't float either.

I agree islands dont float. I just want to point out that I enjoy how the website points out that Islands are rock so would sink... warships are steel so they should sink too? What if a land mass was pumice or hollow?

o rly?

Australia is frequently described as an "Island Continent" so that is probably what they were going for.

Yes really. I actually started that post by including a line that went "Sure, there are floating batches of floating mud or peat with some grass growing on them that are called "Floating islands" but that doesn't mean the default "island" floats", then took it out just to see if you'd try to score pendantic points. So congradulations! you win the predictable nitpicker award! You can always be counted on to derail any topic by to show off unrelated trivia

And it's also irrelevent. you're own link discribes them as A floating island is a mass of floating aquatic plants, mud, and peat ranging in thickness from several centimetres to a few metres.. and Floating islands are generally found on marshlands, lakes, and similar wetland locations, and can be many hectares in size.

So even granting there are masses of floating mud called floating islands, this has no relevence to Atlantis.

Do you think an iceberg can qualify as an island?

Is there any rule that continents can't float? I thought all mantle floated on magma anyway.

Well there you go. the Definition of Contenents is specifically that they go all the way down to the Tetonic Plate itself, under the earth. Islands are either Volcanic islands which build material from the ocean floor up until they break through, or are smaller bits of land sitting on the same lithosphere as a larger continent.

This is why Australia is a Contenent while Greenland is an Island. Australia has it's own Lithosphere and tetonic plate, while Greenland is an island resting on North America's plate.

In fact, it was recently proven that New Zealand is, actually, not an Island at all, but a continent called Tasmantis. (This was proven a few months ago, Wikipedia quote linked hasn't updated yet: this is why Wikipedia can't be relied on as a sole source)

They proved that New Zealand actually rests on it's own Continental lithosphere and tetonic plate, and thus qualifies as a Contienent, even though only a tiny part of it is above water.

Those are floating islands, not islands that float. Its just what that phenoena is called, but does not mean they are the same as actual islands. It's like saying hamburgers are made of ham. Just because the word is in the name doesn't mean it is what the word is.

I don't think that is an etymological equivalent since it's derived from the city of Hamburg.

"island that floats" is what "floating island" means. Look at https://sonic.wikia.com/wiki/Angel_Island for example.

"Turtles! I'm taking April along with Manhattan island!"

Shreddar doesn't believe it ceases to be an island just because it's no longer attached to the continent. CHECKMATE.

No, its not.
It isn't an island.
Playing word games to try and redefine something with a different meaning to win a semanitcs argument is worse than pointless. It is only going to get this thread locked and that is not going to let people actually discuss the *REAL* issue here, which is sea level changes.

So lets drop the word games over trying to play gotcha definition on island and focus on the sea level.
For what good it does.

My take on it is that there was a combination of factors that went into this.
The first is that there were a *lot* of dimensional shifts in those first days. Huge portions of the continents dimensionally shifted with parallel universes... which means that some parts of the worlds coast lines are actually higher or lower than they were before. This explains why even though the sea level went up many areas that should have flooded didn't while areas that shouldn't have flooded did.

Second off, due to the continual linkage with the elemental plane of water and other oceans the oceans of Earth are...funny. They don't quite follow the normal rules. This means that there are some pretty odd current issues going on (which explains how the weather system is still vaguely like we know it) due to thermal plumes and stuff. Also the water tends to have a much more pronounced sea level change than in our world.

One is a creation of Fiction, One is also fiction, and neither qualify as what a floating island is actually defined as. And in any case, the definition of a continent is something attached to a contentinal plate, and thus cannot be floating.

Rifts Atlantis is also fiction. I expect Kevin Siembieda to be more influenced by Shredder than to be a stickler for such semantics. Has there been any actual discussion of Atlantis being strongly connected to the tectonic plates? Being teleported in from another dimension gives the impression of some watery lubricant seeping into the cracks of its disconnect.

It is called a contienent in several places?
As contienents have a specific definition... then yes, it has a tectonic plate. In fact it has its OWN tectonic plate, and part of the massive disruption of the earth was that part of the crust was replaced! As in parts of the current tectonic plates were sliced away and replaced with a new plate (I will leave the mechanics of HOW that works to the imagination... I asume "its magic" and "dimensional slipage" are part of it)
Be this as it may, the issue is rather pointless.
Unless you can provide some proof of your assertion that Atlantis is not really the Continent that it is described in the books, but is really some sort of bizzare floating object... then that is just your headcanon and trying to defend it here is derailing the discussion. Defending the idea that "well, it could be possible because there isnt anything saying specifically in so many words that Atlantis doesnt float" is just absurd and wasting everyones time.
So, please for the sake of those who wish to actually discuss the actuall topic... please let this tangent just die. Or, if you just can't bear to surrender a lost cause, feel free to start a new thread on the subject where the discussion will be topical.

It's refered to as a contient rather than an island, and nothing indicates it's floating--nevermind something that size doesn't really float, "floating islands" of the type you linked to have a maximum size far smaller than that, not to mention a composition of lose mud and similar, not the kind of hard rock quarries needed to build Pyramids.

Face it, it's a contienent, it does not float, I'm not sure why your so dead set on saying it does, given there's no evidence in game to support it. When all your best arguments call on unrelated media it's a pretty sure indication your claim that Atlantis is a floating island just dosn't hold up.

So?


That would depend on its density.


Just because Atlantis is bigger than Manhatten doesn't mean it can't be levitated.


How do you know that they got the stone for the Pyramids from the island and not elsewhere?


They all float down here


Nor any evidence to deny it, because common usage of continent/island in fiction doesn't conform to the technical criteria we see elsewhere.


"unrelated media"

Restating your arguments doesn't do anything to show where it even hints that Atantis floats. Linking to a wikipedia article that shows "Floating Islands" is a term that exists does not constitute an argument for why Atlantis floats, any more than it is it an argument for why Okinawa Island floats. it just establishes a term exists. That's all. How does it apply to Atlantis, and more importantly, why does it apply? You've done nothing but post links to Non-palladium products that say Atlantis is floating. Which doesn't really have anything to do with the case. what Non-rifts Media say about Atlantis doesn't matter. There's no reason to think anything you linked applies here.

I'm not arguing that it's been described as floating, just that I don't think the possibility has been ruled out. You've also appealed to non-Rifts media (Quora) to make the argument that it couldn't be floating due to being called an island or continent.

So you're arguing that it's called a continent because it is capable of controlling its bowels and bladder?

I'd always assumed that it just returned to roughly where it was when it was teleported away in relation to existing plates, not that it rifted in its own tectonic plate as well.

Continent in the inclusive sense of 'very large land mass' (such as Floating Continent in FF6) not in the exclusive sense of 'land mass connected to a tectonic plate' which I don't think would be the general usage, because I doubt most people who use the even know stuff like that about places like Australia.

Since not everyone reads the Rifts Forum
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=156785
This is exactly the sort of pedantic quibbling that gets threads locked.
Seriously people. Trying to argue over the definition of what a continent is and if they float or not?
If that isn't pedantic quibbling then I'm not sure what is.

So, hey, novel idea here. Lets not get the thread locked by violating the ToS and instead discuss the topic. Which is how much did the sea level rise.
If people want to discuss what continents are, and if they float... then make a new thread for it, don't hijack this one for that off topic discussion please.
Note: That does include trying to get the last word in by making one last post on the subject. Seriously people, please just drop the subject or take it to a new thread. Thank You.

Well, backtracing, I was certainly not the first to use the term "float". What I had said:

My point stands: if the elevation of waters worldwide is supposed to be due to Atlantis' displacement (unless perhaps, when it was Rifted in, some water was also swapped to the pocket dimension it came from) then if there was some way to calculate the volume of water required to elevate the sea levels to Rifts Earth levels, that should tie the volume of Atlantis' submerged mass.


Whether or not it is "floating" doesn't matter: most fertile land has underground streams and the like, and at some point Atlantis was disconnected from the ocean bed, so even if it now sits on it, any bonding that has resulted from gravity (assuming Atlantis is tall enough to sit on the ocean bed and rise above water) over a couple centuries is probably not as stable as the continents which have remain connected to the continental shelves for millenia.

Even if it's "packed" enough to be "connected", there's bound to be weird little water pockets of disconnect down there due to lack of time for settling, unless the Splugorth send Stone Wizard divers down there to fix it up.

However stable it is now, when Atlantis first arrived (presumably at some point in Chaos Earth, I can't remember if we got an exact date) it should've been less stable, with earthquakes and shifting and all kinds of weirdness as a land-mass that had been separated in another dimension suddenly gets plopped onto an ocean bed which had millenia to change shape to not fit snugly with the removed land.

*sigh*
Setting aside your desire to get the last word in on the subject...
...your wrong on at least two premises
First your wrong to assume that the volume of Atlantis is the amount that the sea rose. We know that is false since we can point to things like Australia as examples of places where there have been other changes.

Second you are wrong to assume that Atlantis simply 'plops' back in and that it is not a d-shift like that of the Yucatan or fade towns or any of the other d-shifts.

Based on the fact that we can demonstrate that the sea level changes are uneven globally, and that we can demonstrate that geographic changes happen both frequently, and snugly... it seems safe to conclude that the changes to sea level are simply a continuation of this effect but at sea instead of on land.

Pointing out the definition of words isn't "Media"

Well that depends on your definition of isn't ; )

"It all depends on what your definition of 'is' is." - How do you do a Clinton voice on the forums?

[Bill Clinton voice]"it all depends on what your definition of 'is' is."[/Bill Clinton voice]
There you go

Pretty sure he'd get banned for pedantic quibbling.

You mean people actually get banned for that? Because I have seen frequent quibbling on here that put old Slick Willie to shame.

I'm sure that a ban will come eventually given the recent emphasis placed on it by the mods.

Tiklik's eternal sipping and South America's eternal flooding are certainly other factors. I can't remember how long those have been around. Do you recall if they were around in Chaos Earth? I'm wondering if CE ever included maps and if they differed or not.


What would the key difference be?


Earthquakes and stuff could explain unevenness, sure. Seaquakes could also have input. But I believe I recall some explicit reference to Atlantis being the prime cause of global flooding. I'm not sure if that was WOG or Tarn though.


Web pages are media. You pointed to something some guy named Tausif Parker wrote on 21 January 2016. Not sure why I should care about that guy.

Rifts Australia:
*pg 9 "islands within an island" + "it's a big island continent" (from big Kev himself)
*pg 89 "a Dark Age fell over the island continent"

Clearly "continent" and "island" are not mutually exclusive in Rifts. I also haven't seen anywhere in Rifts saying that islands are incapable of floating.

Without clear word on the subject, I think the best answer is : we do not know, let the GM decide.

Whether or not islands/continents float in present day doesn't matter, since Rifts may have changed that. There's a lot of possible options with geography in Rifts.

No maps in CE.
And Tiklik's eternal sipping should lower the sea level, not add quadrillions (or more) of gallons of extra water for an inland ocean.


The d-shifts do not have the land dropping in on the preexisting hole and settling in, there is no space below. Nor does it displace anything It simply replaces what was there with what is there now.


By uneven I mean that the height is uneven.
The level is higher in someplace than other places
Dinosaur swamp is not flooded, while central Australia is. Europe is not flooded while parts of the Amazon are.
The sea level changes are arbitrary and do not change with any rhyme or reason... aka they are uneven.
If you can cite some explicit statement that Atlantis was the cause of global flooding then by all means do so.

<Pedantic Quibiling snipped so as to not violate the TOS>

Perhaps South America's eternal flooding started out too quick for his eternal sipping, then reached equilibrium.

"Factors" can subtract or add. The question is if he sips faster than the Plane of Water rifts pour it on