User:MMFolchart/Ta Meri

Ta Meri is a fictional planet created by M.M Folchart for the series of science fiction/ fantasy books of the same name. Ta Meri is the 5th planet from it's star, Rahel, orbiting it every 364 Earth days. It has one natural satellite, Malune, which orbits Ta Meri every 28 days. It is named after the goddess of land and bounty.

Ta Meri is a terrestrial planet, of a similar size, gravity, and bulk composition as Earth, though it does differ in small ways. It's atmospheric pressure is very slightly denser, consisting of 22% oxygen rather than 21%. Ta Meri's gravity is 9.6m/s2 instead of 9.78m/s2. Ta Meri is slightly warmer than earth, with an average surface temperature of 20°C instead of 15°C, though on average more moderate across the planet than on earth. The higher average temperature is primarily because the ice coverage, though similar to earths at 10% of the planets surface, is more evenly split between poles, and less prone to extreme lows. Ta Meri is also marginally closer to Rahel than the Earth is to the Sun, making it warmer, though there have been periods of time when the Earth was far hotter than Ta Meri is now. Ta Meri has a surface area of 503,842,289 km2, 78% of which is covered in water, 10% of which is ice, roughly 5% at each pole. The high water-to-land ratio helps stabilize the tamerian climate.

Ta Meri has 6 continents, 2 polar continents, Terimia to the north and Termios to the north (erimia and ermios meaning deserted, wild, uninhabited, in Greek), Jaaskîy (red in Hausa + land in cree), Mitellus (Mitte, gemran for middle + tellus, latin for land), Storwold (Stor, large in Norwegian + wold, old english for forest), Ravitu (Ravi, Indian for sun + tu, chinese for land).

Name and Etymology
Ta Meri is the mother goddess of land and bounty recognized in some form by almost all cultures on the planet. Inhabitants of Ta Meri may call the planet variations on this name, but this is the term for their world in Loshn, the common tongue used for trading. Loshn originated from necessity as trading between nations developed. Loshn has very loose grammar rules, like the languages from Storwold as it was simplest for traders to learn, but it's vocabulary draws on the languages from many nations, generally whatever was considered easiest to learn and communicate. Ta Meri is hybridzation of the Talamuti honorific Ta and the Jaaryivi Mere meaning mother and Mitellan Mati meaning plenty and Ravitian Meyri meaning holy land. Ta Meri is the formal term for the world of the Tamerians, but they use the term 'earth' to refer to the ground, or world to refer to the globe. In colloquial language when referring to the goddess, Meri is capitalized but the 'Ta' is sometimes dropped, such as 'What on Meri's green earth are you doing?", but when referring to aspects of the planet, the word is melded to Tamerian.

Tectonic plates
Like earth, the mechanically rigid outer layer of Ta Meri, the lithosphere, is broken into pieces called tectonic plates. These plates are rigid segments that move in relation to one another at one of three types of plate boundaries: Convergent boundaries, at which two plates come together, Divergent boundaries, at which two plates are pulled apart, and Transform boundaries, in which two plates slide past one another laterally. Earthquakes, volcanic activity, mountain-building, and oceanic trench formation can occur along these plate boundaries. The tectonic plates ride on top of the asthenosphere, the solid but less-viscous part of the upper mantle that can flow and move along with the plates, and their motion is strongly coupled with convection patterns inside the Earth's mantle. As the tectonic plates migrate across the planet, the ocean floor is subducted under the leading edges of the plates at convergent boundaries. At the same time, the upwelling of mantle material at divergent boundaries creates mid-ocean ridges. The combination of these processes continually recycles the oceanic crust back into the mantle.

The seven major plates are the Pacific, North American, Eurasian, African, Antarctic, Indo-Australian, and South American. Other notable plates include the Arabian Plate, the Caribbean Plate, the Nazca Plate off the west coast of South America and the Scotia Plate in the southern Atlantic Ocean. The Australian Plate fused with the Indian Plate between 50 and 55 mya. The fastest-moving plates are the oceanic plates, with the Cocos Plate advancing at a rate of 75 mm/year[87] and the Pacific Plate moving 52–69 mm/year. At the other extreme, the slowest-moving plate is the Eurasian Plate, progressing at a typical rate of about 21 mm/year.[88]