PmWiki | LeftBeyond / Maps

The most obvious difference between the pre-Appearing and post-Appearing world is the latter's flatness: New Jerusalem is the tallest point on the planet, at approximately 1000ft of elevation. Gone are the great mountains, canyons, ravines and waterfalls of the past.

Rivers now flow placidly from the plateaus that used to be mountains into the sea, and the Niagara Falls have been replaced with a series of estuaries that the Great Lakes pass in and out of.

Despite the global earthquake, broad landmasses have not changed significantly; Italy and New Zealand still look like footwear, Florida yet dangles into the Caribbean, and so on. However, at a smaller scale coastlines have been smoothed just as mountain ranges have been erased.

Around the world, debris from the planetary earthquake will lie hundreds, sometimes thousands, of feet deep. Rock, foliage, buildings, and water will create a residue that coats the earth, leaving everything at sea level. That means, naturally, that in some places the altitude of the sea will have increased with the leveling of mountains. In others, the sea will disappear under new landmasses.

The only place elevated will be the Holy City itself, where the Mount of Olives will have been rent in two and Jerusalem raised hundreds of feet. How appropriate that the new, holy capital of the world should stand high above all other cities and nations, more than a thousand feet high and gleaming, pristine, and ready to be redesigned and decorated for and by the Lord Jesus Himself. Every day the landscape will change as full-grown greenery appears.

Notably, most land is now fertile, with soil reaching deep down into the earth; the few deserts only remain to counterpoint the endless fields and orchards, and the Sahara has halved in size. The Aral Sea has been restored, and the Mediterranean is now of sufficiently low salinity that in some regions its water may be safely drunk by sailors. The unique beauty of the Dead Sea has been replaced by yet another freshwater lake.

A few settlements have been rebuilt on the site, and bearing the names, of old cities such as Paris and Istanbul; in these cases, priority has been given to reclaiming the historical city centres and even rebuilding landmarks when appropriate. New Jerusalem remains the only true metropolis of the Millennial Kingdom. Counting New Jerusalem, there are fifteen cities in the Kingdom.

Besides, there's no tourism. People wanna see Israel and Jerusalem, but that's more about being closer to Awesome!Jesus. There's nothing else to see anyway. Himalayas? Gone. Rockies? Gone. Grand Canyon? Barringer Crater? Crater Lake? Oldoinyo Lengai? Alps? Uluru? Kilamanjaro? Mounts Fuji and Aso? All gone. Most really awesome forests are probably gone, too. Fuck the Amazon rainforest, you'll never see its like again. No glaciers, either. The magnificent glaciers of Northern Alaska? The stark, forbidding beauty of Antarctica? All gone. Not even photos to remember them anymore, almost no one but TOL could care about that kind of thing, but maybe that's just as well.

Mountain climbing? That's over and done with. Did you like to ski? Ice-fishing? Hunting? Dogsledding? Building snowmen? Homemade snow ice cream, or fresh clean snow topped with hot maple syrup out of a kettle? Yeah, you'll never do any of those things again, summer's eternal and there's no snow or ice anywhere. Hiking? Camping? You could camp in your back yard in broad daylight, I guess. It would be exactly the same. There's no reason to hike again, ever. There's no untamed nature to SEE. There are no monuments, none of the great old buildings of the past, the big powerful culture artifacts that defined entire cultures and nations. All gone, burned away by Christ Almighty. He can't stand anything that might compete with him for peoples' attention, you see.

A narratively constructed "water canopy" exists at the Karman line to block sight of the stars. This canopy also prevents satellite radio communications from functioning - there may simply not be any satellites left in orbit, or maybe they are still there, trying to broadcast. The sun and moon remain visible through the canopy and are in fact bright enough that, combined with the canopy's diffusing effect, there is no nighttime; the clear sky is always varying shades of blue, never dark.

The New Jerusalem Temple spans approximately the area of pre-Rapture Central London, and is the only monumental complex in the world. Around the Holy City, Greater Israel has been divided among the original twelve tribes.

This is a stylized world map that can be used for strategy games.