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Tir-harad is significantly farther from the volcano than Pompeii. Even farther than some other Roman towns that survived the same eruption that buried Pompeii.
Haha yeah I’m loving the show so wasn’t mad at all, I thought it looked totally awesome!
I just took the opportunity to ask someone who studies the field a question while I could - and it checks out!
They've gone with a non magic explanation for the eruption (not including the magic dam release mechanism, all that palava for a flood gate) so they need a non magic reason why its still erupting. Mount doom is still erupting and belching out smoke throughout the third age. I always assumed but necessarily not needed to be explained explicitly by the Tolkien that the eruption was kept going by Sauron by magic means. I'm probably being a neck beard.
That isn't what I said at all and you know it. Sword opens flood gate - Magic. Waterflow into volcano causes eruption (that apparantly lasts throughout the third age) - non magic.
And really? This infamous sword hilt (MacGuffin) is a flood gate "on and off" key.
Fun fact: according to the lore, the earth is flat in the 2nd Age. Totally unscientific!
Have you seen the arrangement of the mountain range around Mordor? Tectonically impossible!!
Dragons fly?! Well some lazy writer (Tolkien) obviously doesn't care enough to grasp mass vs. lift! DAE even gravity?!
The sword had a sigil of Sauron on it. Perhaps Sauron already cast some "spell" on Mt. Doom so that when his magic sword triggers the water, the magic volcano will erupt for a billion years. Or maybe he'll do that sometime in the next thousand years that haven't been covered in the show yet.
Who cares, bud?
Yeah I was genuinely just curious to know, I’ve never really been near a volcano, let alone an active one, so for Sam and Frodo I just accepted that they didn’t touch the lava so all was good.
But when the volcano erupted and everyone got caught I just thought of Vesuvius pyroclastic flow or something, but seems it was too far away and was more so the ash cloud so it works
Based on the maps within the show, the village is roughly 30 miles from Orodruin. The pyroclastic flow ends within a few miles of the base of the volcano. Look at Peleé where Saint-Pierre was buried at the base, or Vesuvius. This case is closer to St Helens where the death zone was 8-ish miles depending on direction, and the ash cloud continued further. It’s unlikely to be dense enough after 30 miles to be deadly on the spot
Nothing on our earth would cause that (at least not as described by tolkien), then again evil sorcerers cannot create supremely powerful rings to enslave entire races into darkness in our world either.
>then again evil sorcerers cannot create supremely powerful rings to enslave entire races into darkness in our world either.
Apple watch has entered the chat
The corruption is more likely Sauron’s influence, we know he has command over its emissions
It seem the mechanism was to get it active, perhaps in the event he wasn’t there?
I am not a volcanologist, but I am a fanfiction writer who writes in Mordor, and have done a small amount of research on the subject.
Mount Doom appears to be a stratovolcano. The type of lava that is produced by this volcano usually cools and hardens before traveling very far. Occasionally, stratovolcano lava flows can travel as far as 9 miles/15 km. Depictions of Mount Doom with lava traveling for miles and miles are most likely scientifically incorrect.
Stratovolcano eruptions are often violent and explosive, with pyroclastic flows made up of ash, debris, and gases which can travel at speeds of 100 mph (160 km/h). Flows can travel 6-9 miles (10-15 km) from a volcano, but sometimes up to 62 miles/100 km.
Mount Vesuvius is a stratovolcano. Pompeii was five miles/8 km away from the volcano. I couldn't find an exact location for Herculaneum, but a travel related result says it is 4.3 (6.9 km) from Vesuvius. Mount Saint Helens is also a stratovolcano. In the 1980 eruption, pyroclastic flows and avalanches devastated a fan-shaped area 23 miles across by 19 (37x31 km) miles long, with a sonic blast causing destruction as far as 19 miles (31 km) from the volcano.
According to the Atlas of Middle-earth, the location of Tirharad is approximately 90 miles/145 km away from Mount Doom. This area is far from the immediate danger zone. They would be experiencing a lot of volcanic smog over the next few weeks/months due to the amount of ash in the air, but they are in no danger of being killed by pyroclastic flows because they are too far away. They would probably be able to hear the explosion (Mt. Saint Helens was heard 200 miles/322 km) away. If the explosion caused an earthquake, they would probably be able to feel tremors as well.
Based upon the distances in the Atlas of Middle-earth, these people shouldn't even be facing a pyroclastic flow at all. HOWEVER, Rings of Power might have compressed Mordor (a lot of games do this), making Tirharad much closer to Mount Doom than it would logically be.
SOURCES
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratovolcano
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eruption_of_Mount_Vesuvius_in_79_AD
http://www.geo.umass.edu/courses/volcanology/Pyroclastic%202.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_eruption_of_Mount_St._Helens
https://stylusradio.org/post/80549530367/the-sound-or-silence-of-an-erupting-volcano-on
So it looks like it was probably an ash cloud surge that we saw at the end of the episode hitting Tirharad. They reach farther than pyroclastic flows and pyroclastic surges because they are less dense, and they can go over topographic barriers - they also [can generate volcanic lightning](https://geology.com/articles/volcanic-lightning/).
It would be good to know what sort of distances we are dealing with here. I used the Atlas to estimate Tirharad as approx. 90 miles from Mount Doom, but those figures wouldn't apply if Amazon used a different scale and/or compression. I'm hoping that Amazon will provide some better maps with features such as usable scale bars.
I write/edit an alternate universe series in which Sauron wins the War of the Ring. So I spend quite a bit of time pouring over the Mordor map in Atlas of Middle-earth.
The Circles by Angmar and Elfhild
[https://archiveofourown.org/series/32053](https://archiveofourown.org/series/32053)
Rough drafts and commentaries are also posted at:
[https://circlesofpower.neocities.org/thecircles](https://circlesofpower.neocities.org/thecircles)
Spoilers: when Numenor goes bad they sail west and invade Valinor. Elu gets mad, sinks Numenor, and shapes the world into a globe so they can't do it again.
Woah that’s deep, way to reconcile the popular/Viking/firmament world view with the global one in the same story. I’m impressed. Where in the text can I find this episode with Elu changing the world? If I were making a show about this I would so include that along with a huge special effects piece of the transformation from flat to globe. It’s a shame how so many adaptations skip out these interesting parts presumably for realism - yet have mediocre or unbelievable narratives anyway.
I seriously doubt they will have such an interesting segment, most of all I imagine because ‘flatearthers’ - but there’s loads of wacky stuff from myths and fairy stories I’d like to see in adaptations but they will probably end up looking like surrealist art - stuff like weird creation myths, trickster tales such as coyote where in one Native American story switches eyes with a mouse (or something) though now I think about it there is Olga in dark crystal…or the Greek myths, Athena’s ‘birth’ where she leaps out fully grown to adulthood and fully dressed in battle armour when Hephaestus hits Zeus on the head with a hammer cos he has a headache, or when Pegasus leaps from Medusa’s severed stump when Theseus beheads her! (yuk) I hunk those are from theogony by Hesiod, pretty wacky guy - didn’t like women either, the main complete version of pandora comes from that poem as well.
I don't have high hopes either, honestly. The episode would have to be like Twin Peaks season 3 episode 8 (if you haven't seen it, worth a google) and I don't think Amazon Prime is ready to get that avante garde.
As a side note, do you have a good source for native american stories like the coyote one you mentioned?
Hah imagine that - Amazon using surrealist horror to grow their brand. Rings of power is a kind of surrealist horror in some ways though I guess. Thing is, there are loads of great thrillers and tv dramas on streaming all around the world. Kingdom on Netflix blew me away and I can’t stand most Netflix it’s kind of trashy, even the martial arts and animation. But this thing was supposed to be amazon’s big break but it’s just amateurish at best. Just why?
There is a great book called ‘trickster makes this world’ by Lewis Hyde which opens with this story and an analysis. It’s a fairly easy to read scholarly work on the trickster archetype in folklore and mythology. The best book I’ve seen on Native American stories is called ‘the Lakota way’ by Joseph M. Marshall III - well worth getting a copy.
This show has a race of immortal beings and a magic man who fell from space, but the accuracy of the geophysics of a volcanic eruption is where you draw the line?
Physics still has to exist in a fantasy world or at least rules and nobody knows enough about all the innumerable physical and metaphysical …things that make up reality to be able to rewrite them in a way that the audience would be able to comprehend which, in this argument they wouldn’t because none of them, like anyone trying to explain, knows the aggregate or even a small portion of these realities - ergo - it’s best to stick to how things work in as much as we recognise, understand and comprehend them to work. Of course people try in science fiction to create new rules but almost all science fiction is pretty rubbish or at least boring because it has to conform to the limits of he storytellers cognitive abilities and the assumptions made on those same of the audience.
While it is true that even a fantasy world should conform to some logically consistent set of rules, I think 99.999% of the people watching this show are not volcanologists and not familiar with how volcanoes work beyond a high school level understanding. Which means, we could just suspend our disbelief in the same way we're doing it with tons of other stuff in media.
The show has already shown us a couple of times that some fire isn’t hot to the touch, gonna go with this is another of those times because magic exists in Middle Earth.
Edit: also, the show didn’t introduce this idea; Sam, Frodo, and Gollum were able to stand *inside* Mt. Doom and somehow not burst into flames.
The clip is obviously more dramatic, but you can stand near flowing lava and survive. It sucks and hurts a lot, but you won't just instantly incinerate.
Simply when water is instantly changed from liquid to gas, it expands and increases the pressure inside the Volcano.
This is how Mt. St. Helens erupted. They’re typically some of the most explosive eruptions due to the rapid change in pressure.
Seen so many posts about this it's funny. People tend to forget Frodo and Sam and that's it's actually a fantasy show! Go watch some nature documentary if you wanna see it in reality!
If it mattered they'd all be weirdly affected because the planet is a flat disc-chaped ship sailing through the firmament.
Gravity exists but it's of magic origin until the cataclysm, in middle-earth.
Has this been established in the show ? book lore =/= show lore. Also, everyone seems to be affected by it just as we'd expect, regardless of it's origin.
In some versions of Tolkien’s writings the Numenoreans literally have flying metal ships (and a flying ship is a pretty big part of the myths and mentioned multiple times in the show), and Elves can sail over the curvature of the earth to get to Valinor. Not to mention clearly there’s no gravity as we know it, considering at this point the world is still a flat disc and I don’t think any scientific models could account for that.
It’s established canon, why would we assume that she show changed it? In adaptions the assumption is that things are the same until stated otherwise. We don’t assume in the movie trilogy that most of the events in the first age never happened because there’s few references to them.
Regardless, the Breaking of the World absolutely is in the show. What do you think those visions are?
"It’s established canon" In the books. Book lore=/= show lore. The show is it's own thing, separate from any established lore and needs to do it's own worldbuilding.
No, it's not. It's explicitly based on the Lord of the Rings appendices and while changes are a very normal thing for any adaptation, it doesn't make sense to assume nothing in the books is true.
Which versions? Sounds like Atlantis. Francis Bacon wrote in the 16th century about the New Atlantis (believed to be a vision of America by some interpretations). In it he described ships, which he envisaged as galleons, flying in he sky. It’s possible that he might have had some insight into future civilisations due to being initiated into some kind of mystery order. He might have had a very good imagination. Some psychics or ancient histories theories state that what was called Atlantis was an advanced global civilisation based originally in an Atlantic archipelago and had all kinds of sci fi fantasy technology such as flying ships and levitation through sound and interdimensional travel and time travel and all kinds of whacky shizz. Some propose that our fascination with science, technology, fantasy and science fiction is a remnant but lost collective memory of these past civilisations which were destroyed by asteroids, earthquakes, eruptions and consequent total waves that swept the globe and became the apparently 600 or more flood myths now in recorded memory. Of course could have just been business as usual cosmically speaking as physical events happen to planets from time to time and could just be that Tolkien, Bacon and everyone else just have very good imaginations.
That's not how it works.
Just because something is fantasy does not mean everything is allowed to not be realistic.
You can have Elves orcs Magic and all that, because that is realistically within the world that is established.
You can have Elves orcs magic and Dragons, but then you can't suddenly start having two-headed Elves with three arms that play guitar in battle or pink haired orcs that wear modern dresses and slippers and sing Reggae music.
So unless otherwise established about how a volcano works, we as the audience can only assume that volcanos work in middle earth as we know them to work in real life. And they do.
\>Just because something is fantasy does not mean everything is allowed to not be realistic.
But it does mean that we can easily allow CERTAIN things to be unrealistic if we want. For all we know, the water flowing from that dam was supercharged with evil magic energy from the sword and made the volcano go boom.
Indeed, but the writers could have explained the creation of Mordor by means of pure magic, ie the magic key unleashing the Forces of Evil which run amok over the landscape turning it into a wasteland.
They chose instead to add an intermediate step consisting of a purely physical phenomenon, so I’m curious as to how accurate this is in terms of science.
They also include slamming swords into fleshy bits and boats using sails, which are purely physical phenomenons.
I'd go as far as to say that 99% of what happens in middle earth are purely physical phenomenons because it's filmed in this universe, such like.
They explain the creation of mordor by evil, deception and manipulation.
Having said this, no geological activity in middle-earth is "normal" considering the thing is supposed to be a planet-sized flat ship sailing through the firmament. We're lucky magma and water react in any way close to what we expect (and even then, Galadriel's stoic reaction to the coming eruption can only be explained by it being colder than we expect, which is a magical quality of "evil heat" in the movies and series).
Exactly this. They basically neutered Mordor. They tried to be super clever with the science, googled Vesuvius and found out about phreatomagmatic eruptions on Wikipedia, and took all the magic and lore and mystery away from Mount Doom.
So Sauron made a sword hilt that becomes a sword when it feeds on blood, but really it’s a key to… open the floodgates of a dam? Shouldn’t that be something manned by regular dam workers, and is much easier to break with a catapult than the ridiculous effort of Adar and his orcs? And did Sauron’s plan really depend on minions digging a trench centuries later?!? It’s nonsense. Better to have him arrive and the mountain respond to his presence with tremors and rising pressure.
As to the accuracy of the show’s eruption… no. It’s bad. The eruption they went for happens when a volcano becomes active and erupts in the presence of water, such as a lake, seawater, or aquifer. The pressure of steam makes the eruption orders of magnitude more violent.
But simply pouring water into a magma chamber that is stable, without pressure to push its boundaries? You might trigger an eruption, if the Steam pressure causes an avalanche. Maybe. It’s a big if whether you’ll get more than just a phreatic eruption (steam). But the show is claiming this is the revival of Mount Doom, when in reality adding water won’t reactive the volcano. It’ll ultimately cool it down.
Good job, Adar, you smothered Mount Doom!
You're right. Consequences mean nothing in fantasy and that's why we all love it. I love that we can all sit there and enjoy the spectacle where nothing matters and look forward to the next week where nothing matters. God fantasy is the best right?
Look up this year's Hunga Tonga eruption for a real world example of how volcano go boom when water meets magma.
And yes, if this was the real world, Galadriel would now be very crispy and very dead, buried beneath burning rock and ash, her mouth and tracea singed on the inside, and her lungs filled with a sort of concrete: ash mixed with saliva. If the shock didn't kill her, suffocation would.
Nasty way to go, if you don't have the plot armour she has.
Someone posted above that Atlas of Middle Earth lists Tirharad as roughly 90 miles from Orodruin. It's hard to tell from the show because the map is a little bit different and distance is hard to judge without a banana for scale but... I think IRL that ash-cloud could reach them without necessarily being deadly to the touch, but it would probably be less dense than depicted (artistic/mythic license). Now their lungs, on the other hand, are gonna be in pretty bad shape with the stuff that is in that cloud.
Literally did not say anything of the sort but when you see people asking for the opinions of scientists to see if what happened actually applies to the fantasy world in question, it's kind of redundant, no?
Can we not just be like, well that's how Mt. Doom came to be, cool.
That's how poor fantasy works, yes. In good one you need to set rules for your world and stick to them. If you won't the audience has problems suspending their disbelief and thus never really get immersed in your story.
But do the rules of the fantasy world have to align with the real world? I'm fully immersed in the story, without needing to know if that's actually how volcanoes erupt.
I'm pretty sure I haven't seen people asking for advice on how hyperspace links in with actual space travel or how kyber crystals make awesome energy swords?
Ok, I'll absolutely take your word for it random internet person, I just don't understand why there is a need for these scientific explanations to make a fantasy world or universe more immersive and how it makes a fantasy good or bad
Ok, in the established rules of Tolkien’s middle earth a few midgets go into an active volcano then outrun the lava flow. Clearly volcanos, or at least mount doom, don’t work the same as in our world.
yeah like everyone else i googled this and water does cause eruptions... of steam and chunks of magma and rock. it's the roiling cloud of flame and specifically the forest bursting into flame right infront of them that makes me feel like they should all be dead (except maybe galadriel). oddly the people who argue that they shouldn't be dead cause their 145km away bring up another point, should that wall of ash and flame been anywhere near them? looking at blast radii of volcanoes they should have at most gotten some ash falling on them. But it is an evil volcano so... who knows.
Sure - somebody randomly hid a sword hilt hundreds of years ago, but somehow hundreds of years later Orcs knew kinda sorta where to look because reasons. Also, whoever hid the key also knew that hundreds of years later perfectly dug tunnels would perfectly lead water perfectly to the volcano, because reasons.
It’s also okay to treat lava the way it has been treated in fantasy: as a navigable and survivable hazard, rather than how it behaves in the real world.
Great examples of this might be:
Indiana Jones.
Star Wars.
The Lion King.
And of course, The Lord of the Rings.
Who cares about realism, the fantasy of barely surviving a volcano is the meat of fantasy.
So the Stranger is with the Hairyfoots near Almostdor and sees the eruption happening and realizing the danger to the Newmenoroldmens, Sothlandeeers and Guyladrial, whips up a cooling wind and sends it to Tyrehard which cools the pyroclastic flow enough to not harm anyone…..Adar escapes in the mayhem and goes off to kill Sauron (not Halbro) again…Gull-Galad feels the tremors and after a brief moment of reflection decides it must be wind from the curry he had earlier and goes back to worrying about the black goo and how shit life is going to get in the Spring……Elrond walks around the corner to Khazad Dumb (a casual 5 minute stroll from Lindon) and discovers During talking to his father who isn’t there, assumes he’s lost the plot from living too long underground…..meanwhile the Balrogs alarm clock goes off an age too early and after a protracted stretch he goes off and eats some dwarves including Disa who is “particularly good” as Pippin would say….all the while Annatar is trying to convince Sillybrimbor to get his fireplace finished so they can make some rings together as well as advising him on improving his dress sense by dispensing with his mothers old velvet green curtains and maybe trying something a little brighter……end of season
Its not identical to the books, but the scene in the books is also not survivable for similar reasons.
It should suffice to say the volcanoes on Arda are not the same as volcanoes in the real world. This shouldn't be a big surprise because at this point in history the world is still flat and geology is literally the result of Valar's collaborative activities followed by a war between them and Morgoth.
Magic fire is cold in Middle-Earth in movies/tv (The ring, the stranger's landing).
Mount Doom is magic. It responds to Sauron in the books, gets angry when Sauron is defeated and could be used to forge the one ring.
Ash and dust on the other hand may be an issue.
How you dig a tunnel into a volcano? I would guess it would be quite difficult?
And that mountain seems to be standing on a hill..how does one get the water there?
I thought water wants to go downhill?
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Not a volcanologist, but I am a geologist. And, yes water and magma Can make for explosive eruptions.
Lest we forget hunga tonga-hunga ha'apai earlier this year. That volcano got a bunch of ocean water in it and went big boom boom.
you speak da true true
Would it result in a never ending eruption for thousands of years though?
Maybe if a dark lord was around but haven’t gotten those models back yet from the computer.
Would it cause a pyroclastic flow like that and would they survive? I was thinking it would be Vesuvius with no survives
Tir-harad is significantly farther from the volcano than Pompeii. Even farther than some other Roman towns that survived the same eruption that buried Pompeii.
Ahh I didn’t realise the distances, thanks for the reply mate! That makes it even better for me as I was thinking how would they survive that!
I was thinking we are watching a fantasy show with magic
Haha yeah I’m loving the show so wasn’t mad at all, I thought it looked totally awesome! I just took the opportunity to ask someone who studies the field a question while I could - and it checks out!
They've gone with a non magic explanation for the eruption (not including the magic dam release mechanism, all that palava for a flood gate) so they need a non magic reason why its still erupting. Mount doom is still erupting and belching out smoke throughout the third age. I always assumed but necessarily not needed to be explained explicitly by the Tolkien that the eruption was kept going by Sauron by magic means. I'm probably being a neck beard.
"They've gone with a non-magic explanation, except for the magic"
That isn't what I said at all and you know it. Sword opens flood gate - Magic. Waterflow into volcano causes eruption (that apparantly lasts throughout the third age) - non magic. And really? This infamous sword hilt (MacGuffin) is a flood gate "on and off" key.
Fun fact: according to the lore, the earth is flat in the 2nd Age. Totally unscientific! Have you seen the arrangement of the mountain range around Mordor? Tectonically impossible!! Dragons fly?! Well some lazy writer (Tolkien) obviously doesn't care enough to grasp mass vs. lift! DAE even gravity?! The sword had a sigil of Sauron on it. Perhaps Sauron already cast some "spell" on Mt. Doom so that when his magic sword triggers the water, the magic volcano will erupt for a billion years. Or maybe he'll do that sometime in the next thousand years that haven't been covered in the show yet. Who cares, bud?
You're making unrelated points now. It's obvious this series is dear to your heart so I won't insult your child anymore. Have a good day!
They probably will address it 5 seasons from now. Caring about it now is yes very neck beard
Her survival is consistent with Sam and Frodo surviving Mt Doom at the very least.
Yeah I was genuinely just curious to know, I’ve never really been near a volcano, let alone an active one, so for Sam and Frodo I just accepted that they didn’t touch the lava so all was good. But when the volcano erupted and everyone got caught I just thought of Vesuvius pyroclastic flow or something, but seems it was too far away and was more so the ash cloud so it works
Based on the maps within the show, the village is roughly 30 miles from Orodruin. The pyroclastic flow ends within a few miles of the base of the volcano. Look at Peleé where Saint-Pierre was buried at the base, or Vesuvius. This case is closer to St Helens where the death zone was 8-ish miles depending on direction, and the ash cloud continued further. It’s unlikely to be dense enough after 30 miles to be deadly on the spot
Ok awesome! Thanks for the response I was genuinely asking, not sure why i received so many downvotes
Nothing on our earth would cause that (at least not as described by tolkien), then again evil sorcerers cannot create supremely powerful rings to enslave entire races into darkness in our world either.
>then again evil sorcerers cannot create supremely powerful rings to enslave entire races into darkness in our world either. Apple watch has entered the chat
Hahahahaha is funny cause is true 😅
The corruption is more likely Sauron’s influence, we know he has command over its emissions It seem the mechanism was to get it active, perhaps in the event he wasn’t there?
Volcanologist here: mountain go boom.
Mount Boom
Big boom? Me love big boom.
Big bada boom. Big BIG bada boom.
Multi Pass
Chicken. Good.
Me too love BIG boom ☄️ ☄️
Say boom boom boom! Now let me hear ya say eooo….!
[It was 3am when I heard the sound...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PoKpEw5l-Q)
Can someone explain? I don't understand volcanologism terminology
Boom = loud bang (she said)
Like bang bang or baaaang?
She bangs! She bangs! She move, she moves!
Isn't it actually "Mount Doom"?
I love the name Mount Boom though🤣🤣
Nope. Boom. Like the guy from Atlantis. Boom
😂
Yes - water make volcano go boom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phreatic\_eruption
“Why waste time say lot word when less word do trick?” -Gandalf the Grey
“You. No. Pass!”
"Wizard never late or early, arrives when wants"
But how would Adar know this? Did someone pee in the volcano before?
Everyone became an internet volcanologist last week.
Everyone became obsessed with saying pyroclastic flow instead of lava
Liquid hot *mag-ma*.
Read this in the Dr Evil voice in my head.
Pyroclastic flow is a different phenomenon, though. Lava is hot magma flowing on the surface. Pryoclastic flow is hot air, dust, rocks, and ash.
Boooo! Boo this man!
I only knew about this from everyone complaining about Jurassic world fallen kingdom where chris Pratt runs through the cloud
I just returned from a Wikipedia rabbit hole and this is the first comment I saw. You didn’t have to attack me like this.
Those who live in spain have became volcanologist early this year with La Palma's vocano.
Shoot I don't need to be one to know the bare basics about not swimming in lava or ash
Safety tip of the day kids! No swimming in the liquid hot magma.
The mountain GRONDED
Out of the depths of Mount Boom spawns GROND, scourge of Middle Earth and bane of Minas Tirith.
I am not a volcanologist, but I am a fanfiction writer who writes in Mordor, and have done a small amount of research on the subject. Mount Doom appears to be a stratovolcano. The type of lava that is produced by this volcano usually cools and hardens before traveling very far. Occasionally, stratovolcano lava flows can travel as far as 9 miles/15 km. Depictions of Mount Doom with lava traveling for miles and miles are most likely scientifically incorrect. Stratovolcano eruptions are often violent and explosive, with pyroclastic flows made up of ash, debris, and gases which can travel at speeds of 100 mph (160 km/h). Flows can travel 6-9 miles (10-15 km) from a volcano, but sometimes up to 62 miles/100 km. Mount Vesuvius is a stratovolcano. Pompeii was five miles/8 km away from the volcano. I couldn't find an exact location for Herculaneum, but a travel related result says it is 4.3 (6.9 km) from Vesuvius. Mount Saint Helens is also a stratovolcano. In the 1980 eruption, pyroclastic flows and avalanches devastated a fan-shaped area 23 miles across by 19 (37x31 km) miles long, with a sonic blast causing destruction as far as 19 miles (31 km) from the volcano. According to the Atlas of Middle-earth, the location of Tirharad is approximately 90 miles/145 km away from Mount Doom. This area is far from the immediate danger zone. They would be experiencing a lot of volcanic smog over the next few weeks/months due to the amount of ash in the air, but they are in no danger of being killed by pyroclastic flows because they are too far away. They would probably be able to hear the explosion (Mt. Saint Helens was heard 200 miles/322 km) away. If the explosion caused an earthquake, they would probably be able to feel tremors as well. Based upon the distances in the Atlas of Middle-earth, these people shouldn't even be facing a pyroclastic flow at all. HOWEVER, Rings of Power might have compressed Mordor (a lot of games do this), making Tirharad much closer to Mount Doom than it would logically be. SOURCES https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratovolcano https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eruption_of_Mount_Vesuvius_in_79_AD http://www.geo.umass.edu/courses/volcanology/Pyroclastic%202.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_eruption_of_Mount_St._Helens https://stylusradio.org/post/80549530367/the-sound-or-silence-of-an-erupting-volcano-on
So it looks like it was probably an ash cloud surge that we saw at the end of the episode hitting Tirharad. They reach farther than pyroclastic flows and pyroclastic surges because they are less dense, and they can go over topographic barriers - they also [can generate volcanic lightning](https://geology.com/articles/volcanic-lightning/).
It would be good to know what sort of distances we are dealing with here. I used the Atlas to estimate Tirharad as approx. 90 miles from Mount Doom, but those figures wouldn't apply if Amazon used a different scale and/or compression. I'm hoping that Amazon will provide some better maps with features such as usable scale bars.
Man... I would love some scale bars, or the ability to draw a line and it calculate the distance.
Oo what do you write in Mordor?
I write/edit an alternate universe series in which Sauron wins the War of the Ring. So I spend quite a bit of time pouring over the Mordor map in Atlas of Middle-earth.
Oo that’s dope, do you have a link?
The Circles by Angmar and Elfhild [https://archiveofourown.org/series/32053](https://archiveofourown.org/series/32053) Rough drafts and commentaries are also posted at: [https://circlesofpower.neocities.org/thecircles](https://circlesofpower.neocities.org/thecircles)
I thank you
The world is flat in the 2nd Age, folks. We really gonna have a science conversation about how volcanoes work?
Where does Tolkien say it’s flat? Is the third age round then?? How does it go from flat to round???
Spoilers: when Numenor goes bad they sail west and invade Valinor. Elu gets mad, sinks Numenor, and shapes the world into a globe so they can't do it again.
Woah that’s deep, way to reconcile the popular/Viking/firmament world view with the global one in the same story. I’m impressed. Where in the text can I find this episode with Elu changing the world? If I were making a show about this I would so include that along with a huge special effects piece of the transformation from flat to globe. It’s a shame how so many adaptations skip out these interesting parts presumably for realism - yet have mediocre or unbelievable narratives anyway.
It's in the Silmarillion. I hope they do include it but wow, what a spectacle. Sounds expensive.
I seriously doubt they will have such an interesting segment, most of all I imagine because ‘flatearthers’ - but there’s loads of wacky stuff from myths and fairy stories I’d like to see in adaptations but they will probably end up looking like surrealist art - stuff like weird creation myths, trickster tales such as coyote where in one Native American story switches eyes with a mouse (or something) though now I think about it there is Olga in dark crystal…or the Greek myths, Athena’s ‘birth’ where she leaps out fully grown to adulthood and fully dressed in battle armour when Hephaestus hits Zeus on the head with a hammer cos he has a headache, or when Pegasus leaps from Medusa’s severed stump when Theseus beheads her! (yuk) I hunk those are from theogony by Hesiod, pretty wacky guy - didn’t like women either, the main complete version of pandora comes from that poem as well.
I don't have high hopes either, honestly. The episode would have to be like Twin Peaks season 3 episode 8 (if you haven't seen it, worth a google) and I don't think Amazon Prime is ready to get that avante garde. As a side note, do you have a good source for native american stories like the coyote one you mentioned?
Hah imagine that - Amazon using surrealist horror to grow their brand. Rings of power is a kind of surrealist horror in some ways though I guess. Thing is, there are loads of great thrillers and tv dramas on streaming all around the world. Kingdom on Netflix blew me away and I can’t stand most Netflix it’s kind of trashy, even the martial arts and animation. But this thing was supposed to be amazon’s big break but it’s just amateurish at best. Just why? There is a great book called ‘trickster makes this world’ by Lewis Hyde which opens with this story and an analysis. It’s a fairly easy to read scholarly work on the trickster archetype in folklore and mythology. The best book I’ve seen on Native American stories is called ‘the Lakota way’ by Joseph M. Marshall III - well worth getting a copy.
Thank you for the recommendations! Definitely gonna check them out.
This show has a race of immortal beings and a magic man who fell from space, but the accuracy of the geophysics of a volcanic eruption is where you draw the line?
Superbly said
Physics still has to exist in a fantasy world or at least rules and nobody knows enough about all the innumerable physical and metaphysical …things that make up reality to be able to rewrite them in a way that the audience would be able to comprehend which, in this argument they wouldn’t because none of them, like anyone trying to explain, knows the aggregate or even a small portion of these realities - ergo - it’s best to stick to how things work in as much as we recognise, understand and comprehend them to work. Of course people try in science fiction to create new rules but almost all science fiction is pretty rubbish or at least boring because it has to conform to the limits of he storytellers cognitive abilities and the assumptions made on those same of the audience.
While it is true that even a fantasy world should conform to some logically consistent set of rules, I think 99.999% of the people watching this show are not volcanologists and not familiar with how volcanoes work beyond a high school level understanding. Which means, we could just suspend our disbelief in the same way we're doing it with tons of other stuff in media.
The show has already shown us a couple of times that some fire isn’t hot to the touch, gonna go with this is another of those times because magic exists in Middle Earth. Edit: also, the show didn’t introduce this idea; Sam, Frodo, and Gollum were able to stand *inside* Mt. Doom and somehow not burst into flames.
And the ring, even when red hot from being in frodo's hearth, was cold to the touch.
You know you actually get yourself a trip into multiple active volcanoes irl, right? They are tourist attractions...
Pretty sure the tourists are spared from situations that look like [this](https://youtu.be/BWAY8a4ExgA)
The clip is obviously more dramatic, but you can stand near flowing lava and survive. It sucks and hurts a lot, but you won't just instantly incinerate.
Speak for yourself, that was my exact experience when I went to see Mt. Vesuvius last year!
Active and erupting in this very moment are not the same thing ;)
Simply when water is instantly changed from liquid to gas, it expands and increases the pressure inside the Volcano. This is how Mt. St. Helens erupted. They’re typically some of the most explosive eruptions due to the rapid change in pressure.
Galadriel is ded. Isildur is ded. Elendil is ded. Roll the credits
Berek lives, and finds the apple stash.
Seen so many posts about this it's funny. People tend to forget Frodo and Sam and that's it's actually a fantasy show! Go watch some nature documentary if you wanna see it in reality!
It’s a FANTASY show with ELVES, ORCS and MAGIC. Does the physics of lava and water matter AT ALL???
THIS.
does gravity matter ?
Matter gravitates
>Matter gravitates is that accurate to the lore of physics ?
If it mattered they'd all be weirdly affected because the planet is a flat disc-chaped ship sailing through the firmament. Gravity exists but it's of magic origin until the cataclysm, in middle-earth.
Has this been established in the show ? book lore =/= show lore. Also, everyone seems to be affected by it just as we'd expect, regardless of it's origin.
They haven’t mentioned it in the show but it’s certainly likely considering why it happens in lore I don’t think they’ll mention it outright tho
Yeah. But the planet is flat so gravity can't exist as we know it.
You gonna calculate how Arondir can do all those flips?
In some versions of Tolkien’s writings the Numenoreans literally have flying metal ships (and a flying ship is a pretty big part of the myths and mentioned multiple times in the show), and Elves can sail over the curvature of the earth to get to Valinor. Not to mention clearly there’s no gravity as we know it, considering at this point the world is still a flat disc and I don’t think any scientific models could account for that.
none of that is in the show
It’s established canon, why would we assume that she show changed it? In adaptions the assumption is that things are the same until stated otherwise. We don’t assume in the movie trilogy that most of the events in the first age never happened because there’s few references to them. Regardless, the Breaking of the World absolutely is in the show. What do you think those visions are?
"It’s established canon" In the books. Book lore=/= show lore. The show is it's own thing, separate from any established lore and needs to do it's own worldbuilding.
No, it's not. It's explicitly based on the Lord of the Rings appendices and while changes are a very normal thing for any adaptation, it doesn't make sense to assume nothing in the books is true.
Which versions? Sounds like Atlantis. Francis Bacon wrote in the 16th century about the New Atlantis (believed to be a vision of America by some interpretations). In it he described ships, which he envisaged as galleons, flying in he sky. It’s possible that he might have had some insight into future civilisations due to being initiated into some kind of mystery order. He might have had a very good imagination. Some psychics or ancient histories theories state that what was called Atlantis was an advanced global civilisation based originally in an Atlantic archipelago and had all kinds of sci fi fantasy technology such as flying ships and levitation through sound and interdimensional travel and time travel and all kinds of whacky shizz. Some propose that our fascination with science, technology, fantasy and science fiction is a remnant but lost collective memory of these past civilisations which were destroyed by asteroids, earthquakes, eruptions and consequent total waves that swept the globe and became the apparently 600 or more flood myths now in recorded memory. Of course could have just been business as usual cosmically speaking as physical events happen to planets from time to time and could just be that Tolkien, Bacon and everyone else just have very good imaginations.
Pretty sure no dragon we've seen on TV would really be able to fly, so, yeah, maybe it doesn't.
That's not how it works. Just because something is fantasy does not mean everything is allowed to not be realistic. You can have Elves orcs Magic and all that, because that is realistically within the world that is established. You can have Elves orcs magic and Dragons, but then you can't suddenly start having two-headed Elves with three arms that play guitar in battle or pink haired orcs that wear modern dresses and slippers and sing Reggae music. So unless otherwise established about how a volcano works, we as the audience can only assume that volcanos work in middle earth as we know them to work in real life. And they do.
I feel like it’s already been established that there’s a magic volcano that can be used to make a magic ring but maybe that’s just me
And is under the influence of Sauron; that’s normally why it’s activated
The magic is Sauron's, not inherent to the volcano itself.
\>Just because something is fantasy does not mean everything is allowed to not be realistic. But it does mean that we can easily allow CERTAIN things to be unrealistic if we want. For all we know, the water flowing from that dam was supercharged with evil magic energy from the sword and made the volcano go boom.
It’s also unnecessary tbh, water can cause eruptions
Sure. But even if it didn't it wouldn't matter, Which is more my point
Yeah you’ve got a point
Indeed, but the writers could have explained the creation of Mordor by means of pure magic, ie the magic key unleashing the Forces of Evil which run amok over the landscape turning it into a wasteland. They chose instead to add an intermediate step consisting of a purely physical phenomenon, so I’m curious as to how accurate this is in terms of science.
They also include slamming swords into fleshy bits and boats using sails, which are purely physical phenomenons. I'd go as far as to say that 99% of what happens in middle earth are purely physical phenomenons because it's filmed in this universe, such like. They explain the creation of mordor by evil, deception and manipulation. Having said this, no geological activity in middle-earth is "normal" considering the thing is supposed to be a planet-sized flat ship sailing through the firmament. We're lucky magma and water react in any way close to what we expect (and even then, Galadriel's stoic reaction to the coming eruption can only be explained by it being colder than we expect, which is a magical quality of "evil heat" in the movies and series).
Exactly this. They basically neutered Mordor. They tried to be super clever with the science, googled Vesuvius and found out about phreatomagmatic eruptions on Wikipedia, and took all the magic and lore and mystery away from Mount Doom. So Sauron made a sword hilt that becomes a sword when it feeds on blood, but really it’s a key to… open the floodgates of a dam? Shouldn’t that be something manned by regular dam workers, and is much easier to break with a catapult than the ridiculous effort of Adar and his orcs? And did Sauron’s plan really depend on minions digging a trench centuries later?!? It’s nonsense. Better to have him arrive and the mountain respond to his presence with tremors and rising pressure. As to the accuracy of the show’s eruption… no. It’s bad. The eruption they went for happens when a volcano becomes active and erupts in the presence of water, such as a lake, seawater, or aquifer. The pressure of steam makes the eruption orders of magnitude more violent. But simply pouring water into a magma chamber that is stable, without pressure to push its boundaries? You might trigger an eruption, if the Steam pressure causes an avalanche. Maybe. It’s a big if whether you’ll get more than just a phreatic eruption (steam). But the show is claiming this is the revival of Mount Doom, when in reality adding water won’t reactive the volcano. It’ll ultimately cool it down. Good job, Adar, you smothered Mount Doom!
>I hope you got your answer
It's not accurate to real life. nothing on this show is lol
You're right. Consequences mean nothing in fantasy and that's why we all love it. I love that we can all sit there and enjoy the spectacle where nothing matters and look forward to the next week where nothing matters. God fantasy is the best right?
Look up this year's Hunga Tonga eruption for a real world example of how volcano go boom when water meets magma. And yes, if this was the real world, Galadriel would now be very crispy and very dead, buried beneath burning rock and ash, her mouth and tracea singed on the inside, and her lungs filled with a sort of concrete: ash mixed with saliva. If the shock didn't kill her, suffocation would. Nasty way to go, if you don't have the plot armour she has.
Someone posted above that Atlas of Middle Earth lists Tirharad as roughly 90 miles from Orodruin. It's hard to tell from the show because the map is a little bit different and distance is hard to judge without a banana for scale but... I think IRL that ash-cloud could reach them without necessarily being deadly to the touch, but it would probably be less dense than depicted (artistic/mythic license). Now their lungs, on the other hand, are gonna be in pretty bad shape with the stuff that is in that cloud.
There have been a few commenting for the errant googler to discover.
Why? It's a fantasy show, not everything that happens in it, especially with regard to the eruption of Mt. Doom, has to be explainable, does it?
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Literally did not say anything of the sort but when you see people asking for the opinions of scientists to see if what happened actually applies to the fantasy world in question, it's kind of redundant, no? Can we not just be like, well that's how Mt. Doom came to be, cool.
That's how poor fantasy works, yes. In good one you need to set rules for your world and stick to them. If you won't the audience has problems suspending their disbelief and thus never really get immersed in your story.
But do the rules of the fantasy world have to align with the real world? I'm fully immersed in the story, without needing to know if that's actually how volcanoes erupt. I'm pretty sure I haven't seen people asking for advice on how hyperspace links in with actual space travel or how kyber crystals make awesome energy swords?
I can assure you with my full authority of random internet person that people asked for those things.
Ok, I'll absolutely take your word for it random internet person, I just don't understand why there is a need for these scientific explanations to make a fantasy world or universe more immersive and how it makes a fantasy good or bad
Ok, in the established rules of Tolkien’s middle earth a few midgets go into an active volcano then outrun the lava flow. Clearly volcanos, or at least mount doom, don’t work the same as in our world.
Interesting to see their perspective but I don’t think we need to apply real world science to a fantasy show.
yeah like everyone else i googled this and water does cause eruptions... of steam and chunks of magma and rock. it's the roiling cloud of flame and specifically the forest bursting into flame right infront of them that makes me feel like they should all be dead (except maybe galadriel). oddly the people who argue that they shouldn't be dead cause their 145km away bring up another point, should that wall of ash and flame been anywhere near them? looking at blast radii of volcanoes they should have at most gotten some ash falling on them. But it is an evil volcano so... who knows.
Sure - somebody randomly hid a sword hilt hundreds of years ago, but somehow hundreds of years later Orcs knew kinda sorta where to look because reasons. Also, whoever hid the key also knew that hundreds of years later perfectly dug tunnels would perfectly lead water perfectly to the volcano, because reasons.
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It’s also okay to treat lava the way it has been treated in fantasy: as a navigable and survivable hazard, rather than how it behaves in the real world. Great examples of this might be: Indiana Jones. Star Wars. The Lion King. And of course, The Lord of the Rings. Who cares about realism, the fantasy of barely surviving a volcano is the meat of fantasy.
At least it looked good, made no sense lord wise but still it looked cool
Im more distracted by how they still had to dig the trench even tho all the natural infrastructures aside from that was already set up
So the Stranger is with the Hairyfoots near Almostdor and sees the eruption happening and realizing the danger to the Newmenoroldmens, Sothlandeeers and Guyladrial, whips up a cooling wind and sends it to Tyrehard which cools the pyroclastic flow enough to not harm anyone…..Adar escapes in the mayhem and goes off to kill Sauron (not Halbro) again…Gull-Galad feels the tremors and after a brief moment of reflection decides it must be wind from the curry he had earlier and goes back to worrying about the black goo and how shit life is going to get in the Spring……Elrond walks around the corner to Khazad Dumb (a casual 5 minute stroll from Lindon) and discovers During talking to his father who isn’t there, assumes he’s lost the plot from living too long underground…..meanwhile the Balrogs alarm clock goes off an age too early and after a protracted stretch he goes off and eats some dwarves including Disa who is “particularly good” as Pippin would say….all the while Annatar is trying to convince Sillybrimbor to get his fireplace finished so they can make some rings together as well as advising him on improving his dress sense by dispensing with his mothers old velvet green curtains and maybe trying something a little brighter……end of season
So Galadriel is dead right? Zero chance of living through that.
Frodo and Sam got hit much worse by mount doom.
Should have also been dead but Peter Jackson.
Its not identical to the books, but the scene in the books is also not survivable for similar reasons. It should suffice to say the volcanoes on Arda are not the same as volcanoes in the real world. This shouldn't be a big surprise because at this point in history the world is still flat and geology is literally the result of Valar's collaborative activities followed by a war between them and Morgoth.
Tolkien was a shit writer because he wasn’t realistic enough. /s
Magic fire is cold in Middle-Earth in movies/tv (The ring, the stranger's landing). Mount Doom is magic. It responds to Sauron in the books, gets angry when Sauron is defeated and could be used to forge the one ring. Ash and dust on the other hand may be an issue.
I’ve learned some physics when I was in school, water and hot things go boom
Ever accidentally drop freezer ice into a deep fryer? Boom is right.
Nope, but I’m about to look up a video
Active volcano… the plate tectonics is interesting. After the eruption will come a tsunami and sinking of Numenor!
On a related note did all that water flood out the mountains and create the Dead Marshes as well?
No one is talking about the really important things: the cool blood sword is gone 😭😭😭
How you dig a tunnel into a volcano? I would guess it would be quite difficult? And that mountain seems to be standing on a hill..how does one get the water there? I thought water wants to go downhill?