[WIP] Building a world from tectonics onward

[Tiluchi]

The warm south pole in that model is due to Teacup Ae's eccentricity, which causes stronger seasons in the southern hemisphere; the significantly warmer summers (and generally flat terrain of the southern continent) evidently prevent permanent glaciers from forming, and without that ice-albedo feedback the south pole stays remarkably temperate. Later runs with a formal climate model have largely confirmed this result (though that also helped highlight some of the shortfalls to my approach to determining precipitation).

Thanks for that explanation! And thanks for the great posts on your blog, I recently completed your GPlates tutorial and I'm a Patreon subscriber. I'd missed the bit about Teacup's eccentricity, but that makes sense. A question however about the elevation: it seems that at the poles, elevation and the presence of ice sheets are somewhat endogenous to each other. For instance, most of Greenland would be below 1000 meters above sea level if it weren't for the presence of the Greenland Ice Sheet, which is 2-3 kilometers thick. The high elevation brings temperatures down, which allows for a continuing ice sheet- a feedback loop basically. I'm assuming that Clima-sim or ExoPlasim would give us ice cap climates near the poles if we were to include 2000-meter-thick ice caps in our elevation map inputs. So barring a detailed history of atmospheric CO2 for the world, maybe the presence of an ice sheet is a decision we have to make ahead of time as we're building the planet, rather than assuming from our geology that doesn't take into account the potential presence of thick ice sheets at some of the poles.

What do you think? As I said earlier I'm not really a climatologist, and I don't have either of the simulation programs as I'm using Mac OS, so these are just my educated guesses.