Busor Sea Caves

Place

Place Name:

Busor Sea Caves

Biome:

Sea Caves

Size:

Unknown

Continent:

Unknown

Subcontinent

Unknown

Geography

Busor Sea Caves is a colossal system of littoral (coastal) caves deeply embedded within the ancient limestone and basalt cliffs on the stormy, wave-bashed coasts of the Twilight Age world. Unlike the open marine stretches of Ad'usto or the arid, wind-scoured mazes of Belth Canyon, Busor is a hypersdynamic geological frontier where the land and sea eternally wage a brutal war. Constant, violent wave action, lunar tidal surges, and underlying structural fractures have etched out a sprawling, fractal maze of flooded tunnels, collapse cenotes (sinkholes), and hidden grottoes that extend both above and far beneath the surface of the ocean.

Topography & Geology

Topographically, the area is marked by imposing, perpendicular cliffs, severely scarred by the gaping maw of cavern entrances, narrow geo inlets and impossibly high natural stone arches. This surface scenery, however, belies the abyssal depths beneath-where the system's geography continues in a complex karst topography that involves flood-filled vertical shafts, titanic vaulted tidal chambers and claustrophobic "pinch-points," some not more than a meter in width and through which surging water roars at tremendous speed.

Geologically, Busor represents a masterpiece of differential erosion: the steady dissolution of the ancient limestone beds by carbonic acid within the groundwater hollows out the cliff interiors, while harder volcanic intrusions of basalt hold firm as supporting columns and arch supports. Deep within the system, where ceilings are protected from the punishing surf, mineral-laden groundwater seeps into the bedrock and slowly forms stunning speleothems; colossal calcite stalactites, stalagmites, flowstone and cave pearls.

Climate & Hydrography

Hydrologically, the cave system is at the mercy of the ocean's tidal cycles. Fierce tidal surges send thousands of tons of seawater miles deep into the system, which can be channeled and magnified by highly constricted passages to produce tidal races that inundate massive chambers within a matter of hours. More inland, pristine fresh water artesian springs seep out from the bedrock to create deep, subterranean pools. Where these fresh water systems encounter the incursion of seawater, striking haloclines (distinct salinity zones) and brackish transition areas are formed.

Climate outside of the cave entrances can change radically: where the coastal cliffs are subjected to scorching, salt-laden gales and corrosive sea-spray, the deep interior of the caves remain perpetually cool, hyper-humid and perfectly isolated. The constant evaporation results in thick, heavy mists that billow through the completely dark corridors like sub-terrestrial clouds.

Traversability

To traverse the Busor Sea Caves is an extremely dangerous prospect and one which is entirely subject to the phases of the moon. The bewildering system of tunnels, fully-flooded zero-visibility sumps, slick, algae-covered rock faces, all conspire to make even basic movement arduous in the extreme. Far and away the largest hazard, however, is the horrifying, deceptive rapidity with which the tides shift: passages that can be walked with ease at low tide become fully submerged, churning death-traps mere hours later and the spelunker must have not only supreme cave exploration skills but also an exact, synchronistic awareness of the ocean's movement.

Plants

Cliffside Flora (Halophytes and Coastal Scrub)'

The flora around the Busor Sea Caves is a subject of eternal, bloody conflict with salt, galeforce winds and the brutal hydraulic hammer of the sea. This is not like Bel'eno, an utterly sheltered old-growth refuge. Instead, it is a highly unstable and volatile frontier zone. High on the exposed cliff tops hyper-resilient halophytes (salt-tolerant flora) and tough armored grasses dominate. The leaves of the plants on the exposed clifftops are designed to withstand a severe, erosive blast of wind by growing in very low mats and having long deep tap roots that anchor firmly to the fractured limestone and basalt bedrock below.

The foliage is thick, leathery, and covered with thick waxy cuticles that not only serve to prevent the deadly evaporation of moisture, but also to ward off damaging and corrosive sea spray. Thesesaxicolous (rock-dwelling) mats eventually accumulate windblown grit and terraform the barren rock into very fine micro-soils that then become the substrate for secondary pioneer species.

Cave Mouth Flora (The Twilight Zone and Epilithic Species)

The yawning maw of the Busor Sea Caves forms a pronounced ecotone, a twilight zone between the harsh, wind-battered, sun-baked cliffs and the pitch black, humid interior. The cliff mouth itself, though protected from any direct force of the gales is exposed to bright, dappled light and contains an intensely dense growth of sciophytes (shade tolerant flora). Here epilithic ferns, liverworts and thick spongy mosses blanket every available rock surface; due to its naturally funnel-shaped environment, the flora of the cave mouth relies not on the soil for water, but on heavy atmospheric condensation that drip feeds from the saturated cavern air.

Cascading over the cliff edge and hanging far down the cave mouth are massive curtains of roots and trailing vines, effectively cloaking the boundary between surface and sub-surface.

Subterranean Flora (Biofilms and Karst Windows)

Inside the deep interior of the Busor Sea Caves, it is impossible to support true photosynthetic flora. It exists in the pitch black of the cave interior solely in the form of microscopic algal mats and slimy, mineral-eating biofilms coating the cave floor and the walls immediately surrounding any artesian freshwater springs that bleed through the rock. However, the cave system is punctuated at many places by sink holes (cenotes) where the cave ceiling has collapsed from the pressure from above.

These karst windows create a completely isolated micro-environment allowing lush gardens of moss and fern to flourish within these sunken caves hundreds of feet below the cliff top in their own miniature climate-controlled terrarium. Additionally, vast colonies of enormous, world-dominating saprophytic fungi exist throughout the cave interior and consume all of the dead marine animals, kelp, and wood that wash through during king tide. These organisms serve as the primary recyclers of all the detritus that flows through the Busor caves, and although technically not flora, they essentially play the role of a plant organism by decomposing and releasing nutrients to support life in a barren environment.

Seasonal Adaptations (Marine Disturbance Regimes and Fragmentation)

Evolution on the Busor coastline has been dominated by an extreme regime of marine disturbance. Coastal flora does not simply withstand the onslaught of winter storms; it actively utilizes it as a mode of propagation. When massive swells and king tides rip entire ledges clear of vegetation the churning water of the crashing sea grinds and breaks entire plants apart, driving them into the caverns or down the coast. As these resilient flora have highly aggressive reproductive mechanisms these broken off fronds and battered seeds will quickly take root within a new crevice in a nearby cliff, the cycle will repeat, and Busor will be defined as a land where plants battle, and continuously win against the sea that seeks to grind them into dust.

Animals

Cliff & Coastal Fauna (Littoral and Cliff-Dwelling species)

The life present on the edges of the Busor Sea Caves inhabits a profoundly unstable, littoral frontier: a brutal nexus where the open ocean meets the subterranean depths. Unlike the deep, solid bedrock safety of Bel'eno, the fauna surrounding Busor must live their lives on land that can swing between dry stone and ocean surge within hours. On the wind-blasted cliff faces that rim the sea caves there are hyper-agile scavengers and nimble grazers; their extremely low centers of gravity, heavily-hooked talons, and specialized clinging-pads allow them to cling to and ascend the sheer, slick basalt face of the cliff.

Predators tend to have fairly static territories on the small coastal shelves above the mouths of the caves, exploiting geological bottlenecks and funneling systems to ambuscade prey funneled inward toward the caverns by the brutal terrain.

Cave Fauna (Troglobites and subterranean predators)

In the pitch-black, super-saturated interior of the cave network, life exists on another plane. Since no sunlight enters the cave network, the truly troglobitic inhabitants are, of course, the troglomorphs: creatures who have shed the need for vision entirely and whose bodies are ghostly white. These creatures rely on enormously elongated appendages, extremely developed mechanoreception and chemoreception to "feel" and "taste" their way around the sensory void.

Because the cave network is so fragmented (collapsed passages and submerged siphons frequently sever complete sections of the galleries from one another), rapid allopatric speciation occurs constantly, resulting in highly unique and localized biocommunities separated from one another by only hundreds of meters. In this dark world, predators are obligate, stationary ambushers, lurking beside subterranean freshwater pools and narrow passages where the scent of their prey is strongest.

Tidal Fauna (Intertidal and benthic species)

The vast flooding lower galleries and tidal-vaulted chambers of Busor are the ecological engine room of the cave system. These are zones where the marine environment directly clashes with the terrestrial cave-dwelling environment. The intertidal zone itself is the domain of strongly-armored benthic organisms, who attach themselves to the bedrock either by directly cementing their calcified shells or with powerful suction-dishes capable of withstanding incredible hydraulic pressure.

When the tide recedes, these regions form hyper-saline pools that trap small fish and filter-feeders, drawing a steady procession of opportunistic scavengers each day. However, the foundation of this darkness comes from the regular influx of ocean detritus--drowned animals, pieces of kelp and driftwood--that gets violently pushed far inside the cave by incoming tides, providing an endlessly renewed food source for the massive communities of detritivores that dwell within the cave system.

Behavioral Cycles (Circatidal rhythms and marine disturbance)

No mention of solar seasons in the Busor Sea Caves: the fauna here is a slave to the gravitational pull of the moon alone. The entire ecosystem of the caves operates entirely on circatidal rhythms, and the prey and hunting cycles of the Busor animals occur in complete synchronicity with the rhythmic push and pull of the oceans. Rather than long-range migrations, survival at Busor depends upon frantic, perfectly synchronized vertical micro-migrations: during high tide, land-bound cave dwellers scramble upward into the dry upper galleries and opportunistic marine predators surge inward into the subterranean darkness, following the incoming water to take advantage of the deeper caverns.

Storm surges act as an immense disturbance regime that simultaneously decimates and regenerates the Busor life system, dumping thousands of tons of organic biomass into the cavern that feeds the detritivore communities and allows the cave to survive through another harsh winter season.

Historical Timeline of Ages

Age Name	Dates	Controller
Stone Age	Before 1E 0	Unknown
Copper Age	1E 1–1E 2200	Unknown
Bronze Age	1E 2200–1E 4400	Unknown
Iron Age	2E 0–2E 700	Unknown
Ancient Age	2E 700–2E 2200	Unknown
Middle Age	3E 0–3E 2050	Unknown
Early Modern Age	3E 2050–3E 2600	Unknown
Industrial Age	3E 2600–3E 2700	Unknown
Machine Age	3E 2700–3E 2800	Unknown
Atomic Age	3E 2800–3E 2850	Unknown
Space Age	3E 2850–3E 2875	Unknown
Information Age	3E 2875–3E 2900	Unknown
Genetic Age	3E 2950–3E 3000	Unknown
Awakening Age	3E 3000–3E 3415	Unknown
Twilight Age	4E 0–4E 500

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