Volcanoes on Pandora

[DeMouse]

For pandora to have the ammount of cliffs it does it would have to be very geologically active. If it werent then the terrain would be much flatter due to errosion.

[Wanderlust]

Plate Tectonics: losts of subduction volcanoes and moving shield volcnoes (hawaii) like earth (pandora has oceans which is neccesary for plate tectonics as we know it)

No plate tectonics but hotspots: Supermassive shield volcanoes like none we've never seen. A continuous hotspot whos crust does not move would just keep building and building on the same spot. Potential for lots of periodic and catastrophic flows and plumes when the heat becomes too much for the crust to handle. no plate tectonics on a large planet makes it hard to disperse heat

Lots of internal heat predicted casue of the gas giant, and its bigger than mars but smaller than Earth but not by much.

[HufweMakto]

For pandora to have the ammount of cliffs it does it would have to be very geologically active. If it werent then the terrain would be much flatter due to errosion.

Interesting that you should say that.

In the Survival Guide, and the Pandorapedia online: it's stated in the beginning, namely the geology part that Pandora is volcanically and tectonically active. In the scriptment, it's pushed further with a geothermally active place that Grace, Trudy and a few others are forced to land in after being attacked by a Great Leontepryx.

[Wameyn]

Interesting that you should say that.

In the Survival Guide, and the Pandorapedia online: it's stated in the beginning, namely the geology part that Pandora is volcanically and tectonically active. In the scriptment, it's pushed further with a geothermally active place that Grace, Trudy and a few others are forced to land in after being attacked by a Great Leontepryx.

JC sure did an awesome job on the reasoning for almost everything it seems, stuff I never even think about, such as this.

[Wind12]

Another thing that would be interesting about the volcanic activity on Pandora is the possibility of some unobtainium being in the magma/lava so when it erupts I wonder is some of the lava could "hang in the sky" getting caught in the magnetic fields( kind of like the arches). That combined the the lightning that would likely be produced would be one heck of a show to behold.

[Palulukan_Taronyu]

I would assume that they would be similar.

[berd123]

Another thing that would be interesting about the volcanic activity on Pandora is the possibility of some unobtainium being in the magma/lava so when it erupts I wonder is some of the lava could "hang in the sky" getting caught in the magnetic fields( kind of like the arches). That combined the the lightning that would likely be produced would be one heck of a show to behold.

Interesting theory. Maybe on this way came a lot of material in the sky and the hallelujah mountains partly consists of volcanic ejecta? At last that magnetic caught material was formed from the fields to a massive structure.

[DeMouse]

Heavy metals don't hang in the atmosphere like this. Its generally only lighter molecules that do that when volcanoes errupt (EH. Ash, Sulphur).

On the other hand we don't acutally know if Plotonium/Nonsensium/Unobtainium is a heavy metal or some special form of carbon or made of subatomic particles that are completely different to those from real life so there is no way to work it out.

[berd123]

Heavy metals don't hang in the atmosphere like this. Its generally only lighter molecules that do that when volcanoes errupt (EH. Ash, Sulphur).

On the other hand we don't acutally know if Plotonium/Nonsensium/Unobtainium is a heavy metal or some special form of carbon or made of subatomic particles that are completely different to those from real life so there is no way to work it out.

Unfortunately it's not possible to go there to take some samples and analyze them.

[DeMouse]

Unfortunately it's not possible to go there to take some samples and analyze them.

Yeah. What I wouldn't give to get a sample of whatever it is.

The only reasonable explanations given what we know about it though is the "made from particles we havn't disocovered yet" option. It can't be a new element because any element with an atomic number greater than the ones we already know would naturally decay into lighter elements very rapidly. It can't be a special isotope of somthing because isotopes are always evenly dispersed around instances of the element or caused by a specific external factor. If its evenly dispersed then we would have some in our own solar system and wouldn't need to go to pandora to get it, and if it is caused by external factors then we would definanly be able to find what those factors are and replicate them, no matter how hard they are to replicate it would be less expensive than going to and from pandora.

I think there is a very good reason that they decided to be so vague about what "unobtainium" actually is. If they define it then it could cause the whole plot to fall apart because any specific thing that I can think of either causes the plot to make no sense or the thing itself violates the laws of physics as we know them. But as long as they don't explain what it is you can't identify the specific issue.