10 Magical Game Of Thrones Details Explained With Science
1. So, What's The Deal With The Seasons?
Without a doubt, one of the most striking features of the Seven Kingdoms is the wild variability of the seasons. It's the main driver of the plot and the reason Jon Snow spends most of his time in a blizzard with a cob on.
Summers and winters vary wildly and predicting their cycles is an imperfect art at best. It all makes for great storytelling, not to mention a killer catchphrase, but is there a scientific explanation?
The answer is yes. Probably.
There is a Qartheen legend that there used to be two moons in the skies above Westeros and Essos, but it flew too close to the sun, cracked and spewed forth a load of dragons.
Aside from the dragon thing, the loss of a moon is going to do some pretty odd things to the orbit of a planet. A moon stabilizes the axial tilt (the thing that causes seasons) of a planet, so suddenly losing one would set it on a wobble, perhaps causing wildly unpredictable seasons as well as long periods of light and dark. This fits in with the unpredictability of the seasons much better than something like an eccentric orbit with would produce much more regular cycles.
Another thing, aside from the aforementioned terraforming White Walkers, that could cause these variations could be something like our Earth's Milankovitch Cycles. This is a series of complex chain reactions stemming from changes in the planet's orbit that cause ice ages and warming periods. Although these take place over thousands of years on Earth, perhaps they're much more rapid in Westeros.
Whatever the reason for the season, it's all kicking off in the Game of Thrones universe. Winter is definitely coming.
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