Thursday, April 12, 2012

Hello once again ladies and gentlemen! Here's another post on the geography of Northrend in World of Warcraft.To start off, we're going to be looking at the particular climates that can be found within Northrend. For the most part, Northrend is a very cold and snowy area. This can be seen in the areas known as Ice Crown, Storm Peaks, Crystalsong, and Wintergrasp.

                                     (shows Ice Crown, Storm Peaks, Crystalsong, and Wintergrasp)

 These three zones could be classified as having a polar climate, getting very little precipitation but are very cold. You can also find a Tundra climate where its not quite as cold as the aforementioned zones but they get some precipitation in the form of rain and snow. This climate can be found in the Borean Tundra, Sholazar Basin, Grizzly Hills, and the Howling Fjord. The cold weather found in Northrend can be attributed to how far north in latitude it sits on Azeroth. If you look at a map of Azeroth, you can see that it is the northernmost continent and can be compared to the likes of the Arctic.
                                                         (shows how north Northrend is)


 Being so far north means that Northrend gets much less sunlight compared to continents that are closer to the equator and less sunlight means less warmth. Next up, we're going to be looking at the fluvial systems(rivers) of Northrend.There actually aren't too many rivers too be found within Northrend and most of them are the meandering type.The only areas that you can find rivers in Northrend are Sholazar Basin, Grizzly Hills, and Howling Fjord. Within Grizzly Hills you will find braided rivers instead of meandering rivers. As you can see, Northrend is a very cold area, similar to how the Arctic is on Earth, and does not have much of a fluvial system to be found.
(showing a braided river in Grizzly Hills)


(All pictures taken by me in game)

1 comment:

  1. Hey Michael,
    Interesting description of the northern areas found in World of Warcraft. I'm doing my blog on Skyrim, and a lot of the things you described here about Northrend were very similar to Skyrim. Both areas are cold and located at a high latitude, which results in similar climates and weather features. I see that most of the precipitation in Northrend comes from snow, but is rain ever an occurance in certain areas? I also wonder how the mountain ranges might affect weather and climate on this area. What kind of clouds are common in this northern area, and does fog ever make an appearance? It looks as though the game developers took time and care when designing this area of WOW and demonstrated knowledge in geography when creating it. Your blog post does a great job at unveiling this information, and points out the key geographical features the game developers applied.

    -Jacob Hirschman

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