Asia



Back home, the collision of India that results in the formation of the Himalayas is perhaps the most defining aspect of Asia’s geography. This massive mountain range has been created with such force that it has uplifted the majority of Asia’s other mountain ranges, and so influential on the climate that over a billion people rely on the rain-soaked monsoon winds for sustenance. To our surprise, that’s not the case here on Great Lakes Earth. India is still an island. In fact, the only thing standing between it and Tibet is over two thousand miles of seawater, and that’s under the presumption that Tibet is still above the surface. Which—surprise, surprise—it isn’t. In fact, it’s a shallow, sunlit lagoon dotted with low-lying islands.


India itself looks different to ours. Back home, its oldest mountain range is the Arvalli Mountains, in which its highest peak, Guru Shikhar, stands 5,650 feet above the level of the sea. On Great Lakes Earth, the Arvalli still exist, and they are still India’s oldest mountains, but Guru Shikhar is instead 1,722 feet above sea level. The highest point in the Vindhya Range is not 2,467 feet above sea level, but 752. Dhupgarh, still the highest peak in the Satpura Range, is now 1350 feet above sea level rather than 4,430. The highest point in the Chota Nagpur Plateau has the exact same difference—1350 feet above sea level, sharply contrasted with the 4,430 it stands back home. Not even the iconic Deccan Plateau is immune to the butterfly effect. Back home, it stands 1600 feet above sea level at the highest. On Great Lakes Earth, it doesn’t get any taller than 500. Anamudi is still the tallest of the Western Ghats, except that it stands 2,695 feet above sea level, not 8,842 as is the case back home. In a similar vein, the highest point in the Eastern Ghats isn’t 5,978 feet above sea level, but 1,822. But how could the mountains and plateaus of India, so massive back home, be reduced to mere hills on Great Lakes Earth? The simple answer—rain. It is currently situated within a mostly tropical coordinate, and if there is one thing that the tropics are known for, it’s rain. Lots and lots and lots of them. So much rain can cut down surprisingly large masses of rock via the process called “chemical weathering”.


The story is similar all across the Asian mainland. Everyone has the same mountain ranges as back home, but without the Himalayas, and under the mercy of millions of years of intense rainy seasons, they are not as major as they are back home. The Greater Khingan Range in China’s Inner Mongolia Region stands no higher than 2,035 feet above sea level. The highest point in the Lesser Khingan Range, in turn, is 1,429 feet above sea level. The Changbai Mountains still separate China from Korea, and Mount Paektu is still its highest peak, but on Great Lakes Earth, it stands 2,744 feet above sea level, not 9,003. Other mountain ranges follow suit.

  • Taihang Mountains: Highest point, Xiaowutai. Earth elevation: 9,455 feet above sea level. Great Lakes Earth elevation: 2,882 feet above sea level.
  • Taishan Mountains: Highest point, Mount Tai. Earth elevation: 5,029 feet above sea level. Great Lakes Earth elevation: 1,532.7 feet above sea level.
  • Dabie Mountains: Highest point, Mount Tianzhu. Earth elevation: 5,830 feet above sea level. Great Lakes Earth elevation: 1,777 feet above sea level.
  • Kunlun Range: Highest point, Liushi Shan. Earth elevation: 23,514 feet above sea level. Great Lakes Earth elevation: 7,167 feet above sea level.
  • Qinling: Highest point, Mount Taibai. Earth elevation: 12,359 feet above sea level. Great Lakes Earth elevation: 3,767 feet above sea level.
  • Dabashan: Highest point, Shennong Deng. Earth elevation: 10,187 feet above sea level. Great Lakes Earth elevation: 3,105 feet above sea level.
  • Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau: Earth elevation: 1,600 to 8,200 feet above sea level. Great Lakes Earth elevation: 500 to 2,500 feet above sea level.
  • Hunan Province: Highest point, Ling Peak. Earth elevation: 6,963.1 feet above sea level. Great Lakes Earth elevation: 2,122.35 feet above sea level.
  • Jiangxi Province: Highest point, Mount Huanggang. Earth elevation: 7,077 feet above sea level. Great Lakes Earth elevation: 2,157 feet above sea level.
  • Wuling Mountains: Highest point, Mount Fanjing. Earth elevation: 8,430 feet above sea level. Great Lakes Earth elevation: 2,570 feet above sea level.
  • Altyn-Tagh: Highest point, Sulamutag Feng. Earth elevation: 20,489 feet above sea level. Great Lakes Earth elevation: 6,245 feet above sea level.
  • Qilian Mountains: Highest point, Qilian Shan. Earth elevation: 19,055 feet above sea level. Great Lakes Earth elevation: 5,808 feet above sea level.


With no Himalayas, these mountains are China’s highest peaks:

  • Kongur Tagh, 7,649 feet above sea level
  • Muztagh Ata, 7,546 feet above sea level
  • Gongga Shan, 7,556 feet above sea level
  • Tömür Shan, 7,439 feet above sea level



Mongolia’s highest point is still Khüiten Peak, but it stands 4,374 feet above sea level, not 14,350 feet like back home. Even the mighty mountains and plateaus of Siberia have, compared to back home, suffered major cutdowns.

  • Anadyr Highlands. Maximum elevation: 1,221 feet above sea level.
  • Baikal Mountains. Maximum elevation: 2,572 feet above sea level.
  • Khamar-Daban. Maximum elevation: 2,396 feet above sea level.
  • Chersky Range. Maximum elevation: 3,003 feet above sea level.
  • Chukotka Mountains. Maximum elevation: 19,840.6 feet above sea level.
  • Dzhugdzhur Mountains. Maximum elevation: 1,906 feet above sea level.
  • Kolyma Mountains. Maximum elevation: 1,828 feet above sea level.
  • Koryak Mountains. Maximum elevation: 27,580 feet above sea level.
  • Sayan Mountains. Maximum elevation: 3,492 feet above sea level.
  • Tannu-Ola Mountains. Maximum elevation: 3,061 feet above sea level.
  • Ural Mountains, though that’s a bit of a political debate. Maximum elevation: 1,895 feet above sea level.
  • Verkhoyansk Range. Maximum elevation: 2,409 feet above sea level.
  • Yablonoi Mountains. Maximum elevation: 2,519 feet above sea level.
  • Central Siberian Plateau. Maximum elevation: 1,678 feet above sea level.
  • Altai Mountains. Maximum elevation: 4,506 feet above sea level.


Why two of the listed ranges, the Chukotka and the Koryak mountains, are actually much taller on Great Lakes Earth than they are back home is simple. Being so close to the Pacific, they are a part of one of the crowning achievements of the Golden Age of Granite, the “Monstrosities of the Ring of Fire”, as they are informally called. This same process is why modern-day Great Lakes Earth still has Beringia, a thousand-mile-wide body connecting Asia to North America. It totals in at an area of 1.6 million square miles, erasing not just the Bering Sea and the Bering Strait out of existence, but also the Chukchi, Laptev, Kara and East Siberian seas, as well as the Sea of Okhotsk, turning the islands of the Kurils into coastal strips of mainland that can get no taller than 25,177.5 feet above sea level. We’ll talk more about Beringia once we get to North America.


The monstrosities of the Chukotkas and the Koryaks are just small demonstrations of the contrast between the Pacific differences and the mainland differences. The mountains of the Pacific, both here and on Great Lakes Earth, are not affected in any way by the Himalayas. Instead, the broken pieces of earth that make up the world’s largest ocean do the hard work in that particular region. Mount Fuji is still Japan’s highest peak, but it’s a lot higher—29,083 feet above sea level, as opposed to the 12,395.8 feet back home. Incidentally, this higher elevation has transformed the Japanese chain from an archipelago to a coastal barrier standing between the Pacific Ocean and the less-than-150,000-square-mile, 1,752-foot-deep Lake Yamato, shallow enough to expose some parts of the Tsushima and Yamato basins to the surface. Kamchatka is not a peninsula like back home, but an extension of Beringia, with its highest peak, Klyuchevskaya Sopka, standing 20,334 feet above sea level. The Philippines are still present, but its highest point, Mount Apo, stands 12,646 feet above sea level, not 9,692. This sort of uplift has reduced the number of islands from 7,641 back home to 425 on Great Lakes Earth. Borneo, Sumatra and Java are the only islands in Indonesia, and they have accomplished this by not being islands. Instead, the millions of years of granitic uplift have ensured that, regardless of sea level, the Sunda Peninsula, or “Sundaland”, will always stay above the surface. Further demonstration is proven by the heights of the three “islands’” highest points—Kinabalu in Borneo, 17,530 feet above sea level; Kerinci in Sumatra, 16,289 feet above sea level; and Semeru in Java, 15,745 feet above sea level. Sundaland itself totals in at almost two million square miles, extending even to the Andaman Sea and the “island” of Hainan. When, how and why the other islands of the Indonesian island chain have sunk to the ocean remains a mystery to us.


On Great Lakes Earth, Africa has played a huge part in what we humans would call the southwestern portions of Asia. With no Red Sea, there is a debate as to whether or not certain nations like Israel would be considered African or Asian. And as a result of the tectonic snags, the Persian Gulf does not exist, just more land that will be mentioned in further detail when we get to Europe and Africa. By contrast, what’s not controversial is that the mountains are much higher than they are back home. The Pontides stand no taller than 16,854 feet above sea level, the Taurus Mountains 16,079 feet, the Caucasus 24,152 feet, the Zagros Mountains 18,874 feet, the Albroz Mountains 24,020 feet and Kopet Dagh 13,660 feet above sea level. To the southwest, the geological story is the same. In what we’d call Saudi Arabia, the mountains stand tall at 12,907 feet above sea level. Yemen, 15,698 feet. Jordan is still primarily plateau, like back home, only much taller, standing between 7,557 and 12,675 feet above sea level. The sacred mountain of Meron in Israel could be considered many miles more so on Great Lakes Earth, at 13,001 feet above sea level. Lebanon may be small, but its highest point is really high, at 13,219 feet above sea level. In what we would call Palestine, the mountains don’t get any taller than 11,092 feet above sea level. The totally-landlocked Qatar is now a mountain standing 1,109 feet above sea level. These geographical differences are the result of magmatic uplifts combined with Africa continuously pushing northwards and squishing into Europe.


In the absence of the Persian Gulf is an elongated lake, 300 square miles in area, 98 feet below sea level at the deepest and elongated to a northwest-southeast direction. Despite its resemblance to Mundafan, a paleolake from Saudi Arabia, this one has enough differences to warrant its own name. In its case, Bahr-Alqasab, from the Arabic for “Sea of Reeds”.


Behind the massive southwestern mountains is the one geographical feature that Asia shares with Europe—an enormous freshwater lake 2.8 million square miles in area, stretching from what we’d call Mongolia far into the European Alps. It’s very similar to Megalake Paratethys, which used to exist back home but, due to tectonic stresses, had been reduced into the Black and Caspian seas. So why is this one still around? Well, the simple answer is that it stands on top of a major fault line system, making it deeper than Paratethys may have been. Its deepest point, in fact, is 7,257 feet below sea level. The largest freshwater lake on Great Lakes Earth has been christened “Lake Colchis”.