With temperatures going up to 70 degrees Celcius, the desert world of Arrakis from the Dune movie and novels sounds like a completely inhabitable setup. But could there still be some hope? At least this latest climate study of the fictional planet suggests so. Frank Herbert who wrote the Dune novel in 1965 described the Arrakis as a sparsely populated desert land that had temperatures of up to 70 degrees without any natural rain or bodies of surface water.
So, the researchers at the University of Bristol and the University and the University of Sheffield took these details and got on to their mission to find out if it was possible to live in that setup. According to a report in The Conservation, the researcher then created a model and fed various data points into the system.
The study showed that the said description would give them whispery clouds over the desert landscape with thick patches around the poles and equator..
To determine how livable Arrakis would be for humans, the researchers used the climate models used for predicting the weather and climate of Earth. To understand the physical laws applicable in the fictional world of Arrakis, the researchers entered data about the mountains, the planet’s position in the orbit, the strength of the sun and atmospheric compositions.
The model used the inputs to simulate the climate and tell what the weather was going to be during different times of the year
In the simulated setup, the researcher kept the physical laws the same as on Earth. The atmospheric composition was also kept the same but with lower carbon dioxide levels.
The most significant difference between Arrakis and the Earth, however, was the concentration of Ozone, which on Earth is 0.000001 per cent of the lower atmosphere. But in the case of Arrakis, it was 0.5 per cent and that had a significant impact on climate as ozone is 65 times more effective at warming the atmosphere than CO2.
So, when the results came out, they had a different story to tell. While the books suggested the polar of Arrakis were more hospitable and most people lived in the mid-latitude regions, data showed opposite results.
The study revealed that the warmest month in the tropics of Arrakis went only up to 45 degrees Celsius and the coldest months did not go below 15 degrees. This is quite similar to temperatures across many.
However, in the case of the polar and mid-altitude regions of Arrakis, the temperature in summers went up to 70 degrees Celsius. The winters could be extremely difficult as well with the mercury falling to minus 40 degrees.
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