Scientists create tectonic map of the World of Ice and Fire

The World of Ice and Fire is made up of several continents: Westeros everyone knows about. There’s also Essos, where Daenerys Targaryen spent a good chuck on her journey. Beyond that, we have the mysterious continents of Sothoryos and Ulthos.

But was the world always divided so? Well, if it’s anything like our world, no. The continents of North America, South America, Africa and the rest didn’t spring into being wholly made; their current makeup is the result of long years of change, or smashing together, separating and reconfiguring to make new shapes.

A quartet of scientists at the University of Sydney — Youseph Ibrahim, Cian Clinton-Gray, Irene Koutsoumbis, and Sabin Zahirovic — joined forces to imagine how the continents on Westeros might have gone through a similar transformation. Watch the results of their work below!

Scientists explore how Westeros and Essos came to be

The creators described how they came up with their video in The Conversation. “In this project, we worked with ‘evidence’ collected by us and others from the Game of Thrones fictional world,” they write. “This included evidence of past volcanism and mountain building, which are often the smoking gun for tectonic plate convergence and collision.”

"In the case of the Games of Thrones world, we’ve assumed the continents of Westeros and Essos broke apart 25 million years ago to open the Narrow Sea. We mapped this occurring much like the unzipping of the African continent along the East African Rift Valley at a similar time."

You can read more about the details on the site, and maybe get interested in geology in the process.

We’ll return to the world of Westeros in House of the Dragon, coming next year to HBO.

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