Is Frostpunk's Great Storm Realistic?

[@steamlord6555]

I’m betting part of the reason why its staying cold in frostpunk is the break down of the world oceans streams. It’s not moving warm water to north or south poles.

[@RoninFoxSpeaks]

That's a good theory! I talked about that in part 1 in reference to the movie the day after tomorrow's ice age; while it would cause cooling climate change near the poles it should also make the tropics retain heat too but in frostpunk they face global cooling everywhere

[@jaredjosephsongheng372]

Huh I thought it was confirmed by 11 bit that it was basically caused by dozens of supervolcanic eruptions happening at the same time. Making the sun start dimming this making it cold af

[@magni5648]

@@RoninFoxSpeaks IIRC the equatorial regions face less cooling, but the rapid climate change is causing them to experience even worse super-storms that make them even less survivable.

[@Mimi-vw6yi]

You're better than Game Theory because he didn't even take care of this masterpiece!

[@1IteleportedBread]

Agreed, like if they don’t do one of the second one I’m unsubscribing from game theory

[@Bapate-rh9be]

4:34 Rip earth in 2010. 4:39 oh no wait its back.

[@oliverstianhugaas7493]

I'd just like to mention here since nobody has mentioned it, When north and south is cold the north will still be neverending day during summer, so it would be hotter in the north post winter then in the south.

[@chancepaladin]

yeah that's what I figured, the poles shifted or something, and nobody can get out cuz there's a hundred feet of snow in every direction that re-freezes every night. I had a dream about it once, like maybe 20 years ago, super surreal

[@TheCpadron19]

You do realize that the south would also be neverending day for six months during its summer, right? That's the whole thing about being tilted on an axis lol.

[@user-and-id]

@@TheCpadron19 he is trying to explain why they are going north and not south.

[@Beef1188]

Frostpunk is so immersive I felt the chill to the bones... in the middle of a summer heat wave!

[@Daedwartin2]

My guess is that the storm caused Ice to cover the world down to a critical point: The 30-25 Degree Latitude. Its predicated that if ice caps reach that point, the amount of reflected light will be enough that the world enters into a negative feedback loop that causes more cooling which causes more ice. In essence, Earth due to the Storm was tipped so far off balance that it cant actually return to pre-storm conditions without a massive injection of heat to the system. Ironically, right now the best bet for doing so is the very thing that triggered the change: Volcanic Eruption. Because the light is being reflected, what now needs to happen is something needs to force heat to bounce around in the atmosphere like Volcanic Clouds. I will note that it is still viable for between 10 N and 10 S to be slushy or even open ocean still even during a Snowball Earth situation like that due to the fact of the average saltiness of the oceans going up considerably as a result of all the ice.

[@RoninFoxSpeaks]

NGL this is my head cannon for the frostpunk world I've been trying to work out everything for the "sun dimming" theory and essentially mass glaciation would have a greater impact and more easily be achieved global cooling than the sun somehow dimming by any realistic margin IE it would be easier to double the Earth's albedo with heavy cloud cover or glaciation than it would for the sun to dim by 50% yet the outcome would be the same as far as climate is concerned

[@Daedwartin2]

@@RoninFoxSpeaks Of course, the catch here is that we determined that was possible by doing lots of super computer calculations to determine why there was a lot of rocks that are typically formed by glaciation events believed to have been at the equator...after having done lots of supercomputer simulations to also determine that. The best New London has is steam-mechanical computers. Now sure, these are actually rather impressive steam-mechanical computers considering just how hard it would be to make Automatons work...but there's a limit to how fast they can think and I doubt they can pull off the number-crunching to realize that. This only gets made worse by the fact that the highest a human will have ever gone into the air is a few hundred feet on a hot air balloon. We only discovered the Jetstreams because Bomber Command was doing high altitude bombing during WW2 and wanted to figure out what the hell was causing those surprisingly fast high altitude winds. This leaves them with what data they can collect from New London. If their likely substandard equipment(lets not forget that they had to abandon the land dreadnought used to make the trip in the first place, meaning likely there has been many pieces of scientific equipment abandoned in the process) isnt good enough and their engineers education not suitable? They might mistake aerosols for the "sun dimming". Its not like they have sent a single object high enough to see the sun outside of the atmosphere. Though now for some reason, I am just imaging Arendale from Frozen reacting to the storm with "You know what, having an Ice Mage Queen to control the storm around us is a sweet deal." Having Elsa would have been something nice during the storm. Fun fact: We know that frozen likely takes place during the 19th century because the ice trade we see is something that only existed during the 19th century. Meaning in a world where Frostpunk and Frozen both happen, she might actually be alive for the Storm.

[@louiscypher4186]

​@@RoninFoxSpeaks The best scenario i came up with to explain sun dimming was that somehow the earth had picked up an orbital dust ring like Venus and the limited technology of the time lead the astronomer to assume the sun was dimming instead of dust partially blocking how much sunlight reached earth.

[@shauntempley9757]

Yes, and the greatest hope in Frostpunk, is the entire Ring Of Fire erupting in sequence to start the heating, and start the cycle of eruptions. Then, other volcanic sites go off afterwards, but it would require all of the volcanoes going world wide to generate the heat needed to break the freeze.

[@magni5648]

@@Daedwartin2 The Jetstream seems to have been discovered quite earlier in Frostpunk actually - Nansen talks about it in his notes you find if a scout team reaches his storm watch before the storm hits in A New Home. Things like the sun dimming and similar are also tidbits your scouts find in various scientific sites outside the city, not something your own engineers come up with.

[@susangoaway]

Thought Frostpunk explained it quite clearly that the cooling was due to a sudden decrease in Solar luminosity.

[@MrAntice]

About the wind. Blizzards aren't destructive because of strong winds. They are destructive due to all the snow and ice they bring with them. Snow can literally bury a town beneath hundreds of tons of snow and ice. crushing buildings under the sheer mass of it alone. not to mention the fact that the snow is making the moving air have a bigger impact due to the mass of frozen water in it. The kind of winter frostpunk has, will have blizzards that are much more destructive than usual despite the relatively low windspeeds experienced at ground level.

[@Bunker-Nines]

That wind prediction *has* to be wrong New Zealand just experienced a 11 on the scale and even that didn't have the frostpunk level damage! Great video!

[@F4Wildcat]

0:09 Signing the child labou i mean when the game started to play the boss music for the great storm

[@leiderhosen7110]

Actually the cause of the global cooling is strongly implied to be from an asteroid strike in certain notes scattered across the sites you can visit. On a loading screen it references a meteor shower observed in 1872 by a Turkish astronomer, and it seemingly doesn't relate to anything. Seemingly. In-game you visit an observatory where astronomers said that the volcanic eruption of Krakatoa would not cause enough debris to cause such an extreme and long-term climate shift, which this is backed a SECOND time by Tesla, who is possibly the most intelligent in-universe character we see in FP1. He leaves a recording that states that neither the dimming of the sun nor an eruption would cause it by themselves, but instead theorizes that "maybe the great quake was actually an asteroid strike" just before he was killed. So what's implied to have happened is that in 1872, a meteor storm began approach to earth, and in 1887 one of the asteroids peeled of and struck earth somewhere, causing an explosion powerful enough to send tremors across the world, which were written off an earthquake. The fallout was so immense that it obstructed the sun, causing it to appear "dim" as you would be looking at it through the shadow of a cloud of debris, and as it is lingering high in the upper atmosphere it is taking an incredibly long time time to settle and causing this pronounced climate change. I am unsure if it would be this extreme, but after the Permian extinction event it took an estimated *100* years for global temperatures to rise again, so while not "infinite", it would be long enough to drastically change the ecosystem of earth as the entire planet is being effectively deprived of radiation from the sun at once. Edit: Everything you said about the wind is still right, though. The strike would cause global cooling, which would cause massive instability of the jetstream as it is no longer being supplied with sufficient heat.

[@letsatsi2616]

The captions gotta give us celsius

[@timteichmann6830]

Please use Fahrenheit and Celsius at least one or two times to give us non Americans a chance to know what you are talking about in terms of temperature

[@Srakch]

Or learn Metric, a better and more efficient way of telling temperature.

[@LanderKoenig]

Nah, I figured it out after some time, it’s not that hard dude

[@Artreo69]

​@@SrakchNah, kelvin is even less intuitive in that particular case i don't like metric as a European

[@Artreo69]

​@@SrakchNah, kelvin is even less intuitive in that particular case i don't like metric as a European

[@El_Negro2003]

⁠​⁠​⁠​⁠​⁠​⁠​⁠​⁠​⁠@@SrakchNah, kelvin is even less intuitive in that particular case I don’t like metric as a European

[@joelaroche8103]

I like to think that the environmental collapse was a combination of different factor, thus creating a perfect chain of disaster thus leading to the event of frostpunk

[@lee9503]

Thought it was because of a cooling sun.

[@swiggityswanka]

Not the right year man, just wait for another million years

[@bartomolev6682]

@@swiggityswanka the vulcanic dust and lack of technology, understanding of wtf is our sun caused some of the frostpunk scientists to belive in the theory that the sun is getting colder

[@Ely-zf4yt]

​@@bartomolev6682 It says in the game the winter is caused by different factors, volcanoes and a dimming of the sun caused by an unknown reason. It could be that a dust cloud in space began to blot out the sun making the Earth colder.

[@bartomolev6682]

@@Ely-zf4yt ? the sun is not getting colder, but they just simply lack the technology and tools to know what exactly happened.

[@bartomolev6682]

also its all said from the perspective of the pepole in the game, it is not a definitive answer but a theory brewed up by the fictional pepole of that time@@Ely-zf4yt

[@FeralViolet]

I think it's also important to mention that the sun is dimming too, maybe that's why Earth is still frozen 30 years later, something's happening to our star.

[@Bakie.o]

Great information for a great game! Awesome!

[@The_Helmet]

My theory would be a foreign planetary body of some sort is exerting an enormous magnetic pull on planets atmosphere. less magnetic protection would cause ionization of upper atmosphere and would inflict damage upon the cloud cover by increasing it, or atmospheric chemistry changes, like production of nitric oxide which would lead to destabilized ozone levels in upper atmosphere. depending on changes of ozone concentration in the atmosphere we would experience large temp drop. with multiple super vulcanic eruptions this would make the winter we see in frostpunk. Altho, this is only my theory of sorts, if you are a specialist on this topic go ahead and please debunk it (I'm still in highschool I can't do complex astrophysical calculations on the planet so I cannot prove my theory). Also sorry for spelling errors and mistakes I'm not native English speaker.

[@SapphicFireGames]

do we know if the sun light dimming happened before or after the volcanic eruptions also in one of the scenario's there was mention that antoher cause could have been a meteoric impact (but might be better to look into it yourself)

[@RoninFoxSpeaks]

The problem with an asteroid impact is that any asteroid big enough to kick up that much debris or trigger volcanos would also be big enough to devastate the planet so there really wouldn't be a doubt about the cause if that were the case

[@SapphicFireGames]

@@RoninFoxSpeaks i mean am not saying that that is what happened its just something i picked up on while watching an old stream of someone

[@SapphicFireGames]

@@RoninFoxSpeaks and i do agree an asteroid that big would really be devastating and would probably cause total extinction of basically everything

[@RoninFoxSpeaks]

@@SapphicFireGames For sure the game does provide many different lore explanations, its why I consider it to have an unreliable narrator but IMO I like it this way by keeping it open it gives the world more mystery and keeps the writers from developing world builder's disease and leave the overanalyzing to the fans

[@magni5648]

@@RoninFoxSpeaks ​The most probable scenarion IMO with what we're told across the game is an "all of the above" thing. Krakatoa plus a sizeable (but not apocalyptic by itself) asteroid plus some weird stronomic events etc. all hitting in close enough sequence that they essentially build on each other until it reaches a tipping point.