# Planet-Continent Size and Scale



## JBryden88 (Aug 30, 2013)

I'm asking on behalf of a dear friend of mine who is building her world.

She's setting it on a "super earth" - it's about 5 times the size of our world.

How big would a continent need to be (compared to say, the size of our world's continents) in order to have the two ends of the continent be desert regions, with the middle extremely cold on the south pole?

Bear in mind, this is a planet that is mostly water. There's just ONE continent.


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## Saigonnus (Aug 30, 2013)

Deserts in what sense of the word? There are a five basic types of desert; Sandy, Rocky, Stony, Mountain and Plateau, and they are equally reliant on geography as to their closeness to the equatorial regions. Normally on Earth they are mostly in the tropical and subtropical bands with have westerly trade winds.   

Hot deserts are your more traditional sort, lots of sand, few plants, high daytime temperature, moderate night-time temperature and little condensation. An example of this would be the Mojave desert of Southern California.  

Cold Deserts are ones that have a high daytime temperature and low night-time temperature and even can freeze during the winter months. One example of this is the Gobi Desert in China and Parts of Mongolia. The closest to this you'll see in the U.S is the eastern parts of Idaho with a higher elevation.

Given that it's a super earth I would think it would have a circumference of about 120,000 miles total; given that the Earth is in the neighborhood of 24,000 miles. You'd probably need a continent at least 1/3 that distance lengthwise to manage to stretch between the two tropical zones you'd have near the equator. If you have one as a "Hot and sandy desert" and the other as a "cold stony desert" (like in Idaho) you could have a continent of only 1/4 of that size or less since one side wouldn't need to be in those tropical zones.


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