Shäwhaess

Shäwhaess is a planet in the Davi Sector known for its unusual tidal flooding behavior, the result of a botched terraforming project. Nicknamed ‘Tidebound’ before the native inhabitants’ name for it was known, Shäwhaess is notable for a cycle of planetary flooding that reoccurs every two hundred years.
Shäwhaess was originally inhabited by the Kkoarhae, which evolved on the planet. They were later joined by a group of Terrans sent thousands of years prior in a cryoship.

Geography

Shäwhaess Is a medium-sized planet orbiting the star Ae in the Davi Sector. It is in turn orbited by four moons: Kkoe, or the Greater Moon; Vhaeshemm, or the Golden Moon; Mmashii, or the Fish Moon; and Sseïö, or the Dark Moon. Shäwhaess has some tectonic activity, but it tends to be slow and not very dramatic; volcanoes and earthquakes are rare, and mountain formation is slow, resulting in mountains that never become very high due to erosion. The combined effects of the four moons give the planet strong, complex tides. The planet’s axial tilt allows for mild seasons.

Pre-Terraforming

Before its disastrous terraforming, Shäwhaess was comparatively cold for a habitable planet, with temperate zones between 30 degrees N and 30 degrees S, and tropics between 5 degrees N and 5 degrees S. Most of its copious water was locked in ice caps, but enough remained to cover 80% of the unfrozen surface with water, and the unfrozen portions of the landmasses were dominated by lowlands, fjords, and archipelagos, with only a handful of mountainous areas. Due to the complex and frequent high tides and the lengthy shorelines, much of the land was saltwater marsh and brackish bayou; further inland, the temperate areas tended to grasslands and steppes, with forest at higher latitudes and eventually tundra giving way to the glaciers that dominated the planet. The few islands along the tropics boasted thick rainforests.

Post-Terraforming

The terraforming probe sent to Shäwhaess was intended (among other things) to increase the temperature of the planet and manage the weather to produce more arable land for settlers. It did so by seeding the atmosphere with nanotechnologh that selectively enhanced the greenhouse effect; to prevent a runaway effect, the nanobots were also capable of weakening the greenhouse effect and reflecting sunlight away from the planet for a time. To ensure this, nanobots were also seeded in the polar regions to determine when the ice caps had melted past a reasonable point.
The engineers of Project Exosettlement were unaware that the planet was already inhabited, but only because their attempts to check (on this or any other planet targeted by the Project) were desultory at best and sometimes completely absent.
The terraforming probe did its job admirably. The ice caps melted to a degree, revealing more dry land, and the temperatures rose sufficiently to thaw the tundra into arable land. The effect on the ecosystem was pronounced, but not catastrophic... except in one degree. A particular set of semi-symbiotic bacteria and algae, previously found only in sub-polar glaciers, spread north and began to bloom. They permeated the softening ice, and with them, brought their natural biological antifreeze; in addition, they changed the texture of the ice. This confused the relatively simple checks programmed into the polar nanobots, causing them to register water that was not frozen as frozen. Thus the planetary warming continued unabated.
The water released from the melting ice caps flooded the planet, aided by the fact that the land masses never rose very high above sea level to begin with. Fortunately for the Kkoarhae, and those species they rescued, the terraforming project took over a hundred years to fully flood the world, and they were sufficiently technically advanced to be aware of what was happening (though not to stop it). Nevertheless, most terrestrial animals and plants died in the disaster.
The second set of nanobot failsafes, measuring a more complex set of variables, recognized the problem (though not its extent) two hundred years after the probe initially made contact and went into a cooldown phase. This refroze enough of the water to make certain landmasses (mostly the tops of mountains and high plateaus) dry again. Another two hundred years later, it deemed the cooling sufficient and returned to a warming phase, and, once again confused by the unusual makeup of ice and the equally unuusal tidal behavior, flooded the planet again. This pattern has persisted for four thousand years.

Geography

Pre-Terraforming

Post-Terraforming

Alternative Name(s)

Tidebound

Type

Planet