Writer and planetary modeller David Angus details his latest projects, including Time Travel (and Dinosaurs) in Gosport.
I’ve worked a lot on Jupiter’s moons, as you do. Callisto has already been mentioned in earlier stuff I’ve written for Star & Crescent. That’s going well by the way, but I started the Jupiter enterprise back in the last millennium, initially engaging the interest of the art director of Star Trek and more recently Portsmouth University.
With this in mind, and being aware of much of my stuff recently being about mundane blues, I think it’s time to take whoever reads this away from all that, into enterprises involving space and time.
Journeying into space past the Moon and Mars – I’ve worked on those worlds too – we eventually reach Jupiter and its big 4 Galilean Moons. So called because Galileo discovered them.
First Callisto. The outermost moon I’ve been most recently modelling and am now painting. Bigger than our moon, it’s the Galilean moon that most resembles it.
It’s a massively cratered world. A huge impact structure of concentric walls, like a target, covers a large part of one side. It’s peppered with white spots where impacts have broken through the dark crust to the ice beneath, for this is an ice moon. There’s no sign of tidal subsurface activity though, this far out from Jupiter. For that reason of stability and being relatively free of Jupiter’s lethal radiation it would probably be the best Jovian moon for a base.
Further in comes Ganymede. The biggest moon in the solar system, bigger than Mercury and not much smaller than Mars. Parts of it are similar to its neighbour Europa, with stretches of pale, crater-free terrain full of parallel ridges. One description of this terrain is ‘like the work of a lunatic surveyor’.
This breaks into and separates big areas of darker terrain. These areas are older, because they are heavily cratered, like our moon and Callisto. They are almost like Earth, as in the darker terrain resembles continental shields bordered by more recent mountain belts. However, Ganymede is also an ice moon. As the younger ridged terrain indicates some subsurface activity, it’s reckoned there may be oceans under the ice.
Next is Europa. Although it’s slightly smaller than our moon, it’s estimated to have a much deeper ocean than those on Earth. This ocean is subject to tidal forces severe enough to cause a moon wide network of ice ridges. These, together with lack of craters, hint at resurfacing often enough to erase them.
That indicates submarine vulcanism or some sort of activity below the ice. Since ecosystems independent of sunlight have been found around submarine volcanic vents deep in Earth’s oceans, Europa’s activities indicate it may be a candidate for life! Shielded by the ice from Jupiter’s radiation, which would be enough to kill life on the surface.
The closest Galilean moon to Jupiter is the size of our moon. Io. Welcome to hell. Because it’s the closest, it’s most affected by tidal forces from Jupiter and the other moons. The result is volcanic turmoil.
Since Io is ice free, it’s a world that looks like a pizza. Lava lakes and sulphur hues, strewn across plains surrounding isolated alien mountains and blocks of land. A satellite image shows two of these land masses resembling immense slugs. All of this is flooded with extreme radiation from Jupiter.
That’s the space project, now for the time project. Time travel in Gosport.
The venue will be a terrapin hut between Brune Park School and the cycle path. A show was held there last year in September, but I can improve on that because I’ve been helped by a young guy knowledgeable about AI.
He began by creating a brilliant Carboniferous swamp and we had a lot of fun with Iguanodons. ‘Unfortunately’ (hate that word) the voluntary organisation he belongs to had the jitters about funding being renewed by the council. It has been, but there are still problems with the landlord and loss of venue, resulting in him teaching me to use AI by email instead of face to face.
As soon as this happened, I found my computer wouldn’t talk to my smartphone (which was necessary to sign on to AI) because the router hadn’t been sorted out and it’s extensive list of gobbledygook codes didn’t include my smartphone one. It’s why I prefer to find technical help rather than trying to cope.
Luckily, when we were going for it, we achieved the following time travel stopovers visually:
Battle of Britain 1940. Our venue is not far from the Rowner Estate which was an operational airfield then.
Queen Victoria’s time. She will be joining us, like last time. Not only because she is really a well organised ward manager and Steampunker, whose costume research was brilliant; but also because our venue is next to what used to be a railway then, complete with station.
Napoleonic wars, where Rowner’s god fearing community is contrasted with the den of iniquity that was Gosport then. Plus press gangs, giving a new meaning to ‘all at sea’ the morning after a night out.
The English Civil War, moving on from plundering Royalists.
The Black Death moving on from that, also marauding French raiders during the Hundred Years War.
The last Ice Age when it really was grim up north, for it was covered in ice. Gosport was tundra and one could walk to the Isle of Wight – if one didn’t mind fording a river and maybe avoiding a Mammoth herd and the odd Wholly Rhino or Sabre Tooth Tiger.
Lower Cretaceous Dinosaurs, where we frighten a carnivorous one.
Then we became stuck for awhile in the Jurassic, before we managed to get to Pangea with its continent wide deserts, depicted by my Sahara desert photos. My photos will be used in some of the time travel stopovers.
Once the present computer cock-up is sorted out and I learn enough, the Carboniferous coal forests will be reached with their giant bugs and amphibians the size of alligators. Then onward down through time to:-
The Silurian sea with it’s scorpions and trilobites.
The edge of one of the earlier snowball Earths, when the seas were red.
Much further back when the seas were green, the sky was orange/yellow and the moon was close enough to create tidal waves with a difference.
The Hadean. Welcome to hell again, when the Earth had just been formed, there was enough volcanism to rival Io and incoming asteroids were still pulverising our world.
Hopefully this together with audio effects will all be ready by Saturday September 19th. Don’t miss it!
Photo of model Iguanodon by Marcus Ringer via Wikimedia Commons
