Geology Lesson – Nexra’s Delicate Balance

For millions of years the Vendian Particle Mass roamed the Milky Way. The Mass was born from the explosion of a planet circling a sun in a distant solar system. The particles were kept together with the gravity of a micro-black hole. Now, captured by the sun’s gravity, the Mass began to orbit the sun between it and the Earth. The temperatures on Earth began to drop precipitously as the mass thickened allowing less and less heat to reach the Earth. On Earth, water began to freeze and assemble into growing glaciers. As more water joined the glaciations, the sea level around the Earth began to drop having ceded trillions of gallons of water to mammoth ice sheets. Global sea levels diminished nearly one-thousand feet in some places. Receding shorelines brought increasingly exposed land masses to the Earth. Sea and animal life migrated toward the equator in self-preservation. And Man followed the food.

Glaciers scoured much of the Earth of its trees and mountains, but created new mountains and nurtured new forests. Glaciers covered lakes and rivers and created new lakes and rivers. Glaciers re-formed seashores and prairies. Glaciers allowed Man to walk from one continent to another where water had once been a barrier to such mobility. Then, the Vendian Particle Mass was disrupted by an enormous swarm of comets. The light show on Earth was dazzling and enduring. For most of a year, the light from the collisions lit the sky, both day and night. Many religions were formed around the globe as a consequence of these celestial events. Spiritual protection was sought and received for a small contribution of food and skins to the elders. As the light show ended, Man left his spiritual protection for the lovely anarchy and chaos of his youth.

 The Earth began to warm and the glaciers began to recede. And the water levels began to rise. Early in the period of the warming trend, a volcano was unleashed by a receding glacier. The volcanic vent had been plugged by mountains of sedimentary rock deposited by shifting glaciers. Then the glaciers scoured away this sedimentary rock, exposing the volcanic vent. Lava oozed out of the vent, not with explosive force, but with slow deliberate mountain building resolve. The volcano rose up between a long, deep waterless channel now exposed as the glaciers receded, and a large basin that had been a large sea before the glaciations. The sea was named the Great Sea by the humex. The volcano continued to rise. The Great Sea began to fill from several rivers now flowing into it carrying millions of cubic feet of glacial melt from the continent located to the west and north of the basin.

The waterless channel was also filling with water from a large western ocean to depths exceeding the Great Sea’s depth. The channel, that came to be known as the Channel Sea and the Great Sea basin, once connected, had been separated by the growing volcano. The separation meant that the basin and the channel were getting their water from different sources. As temperatures continued to warm, the resulting separate water flows caused a difference between the water levels of the Great Sea basin and the Channel Sea of four-hundred feet. From that depth difference, they rose equally with the volcano, Nexra, acting as a plug between them.

There could be no doubt that the Great Sea basin had held more water before the last ice-age. The basin looked like a half-filled kettle. Except for one, the five major rivers entered the sea from the west and the north, interrupted at the rim of the basin with high waterfalls on the way down to the Great Sea below and beyond the base of the falls. The walls surrounding the sea measured anywhere from four-hundred to seven-hundred feet high. If the sea basin had been smaller, where all sides of it could have been seen from a single vantage point, it would have been a constantly intimidating sight – perhaps a fatal trap if water from somewhere began to rapidly fill the basin. But the humans, and later, the humex who were to populate the region, would not be able to see all the sea’s palisades from any one place. Whatever fear might have been generated from the limited range of view they did have, would soon blend into the background of their lives.