The island of Mata Nui - a tropical paradise that acted as the main setting for the first three years of the Bionicle story. The island was split up into the six Wahi, with each having very different environmental conditions from the rest.
Could such variation really happen on the relatively small scale of a single island? In this video, we find out.
New Bionicle Science investigations every month. What part of Bionicle lore do you want to see investigated next? Give your suggestions in the comments below!
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The fact that the map is scientifically accurate is quite surprising. One would expect that the opposite. Thus making the map even cooler.
Actually, he got the Coriolis Effect wrong. It actually acts in the opposite direction. Yeah, I'm a weather nerd (I snapped my profile pic several years ago). Basically, the air, as it moves directly northward *(relative to the rotating earth)* is moving faster in the eastward direction than the more northern ground below it.
@@FLPhotoCatcher Oh. Thank you for the correction.
Okay, two things: 1: I really love how you didn't just leave your explanations off on the surface. You could have easily just said "Mata Nui must be tropical because it's warmer closer to the equator". That would have been passable for a video like this. But you didn't just stop there, and actually explained why that is. Kudos for that. 2: I did have to close this video and come back later because your images of ga-wahi made me so nostalgic and filled with a longing to visit a fictional location that it physically hurt. Don't know what that says about me...
I am a big bionicle fan. Bionicle was my childhood. I was there for its birth and cried when it died in 2010. lehvak-kal, GAHLOK-KAL, Lerahk, Guurahk, and Pohatu nuva were my first five sets. Ever since then I have never stopped loving bionicle. ;)
Don't quote me on this, but if memory serves the end of the Mata Nui Online game shows Takua and Vakama watching the sunset on the beach between Ta and Ga-Wahi. This would add credence to a clockwise rotation and the sun rising in the west and setting in the east. I had always assumed a rain shadow thanks to Mount Ihu would help cause the Po-Wahi desert, but I never could sus out how storms were only coming from the south and not the north.
What type of forces were involved when that one Borokh-Kal got yeeted into space? Would it have become a satellite orbiting the local celestial bodies?
God, this is such high quality investigation! I love how oddly consistent the geography in Bionicle turned out with this!
Okay you've done the climate, how about the weather? a water world wouldn't have large landmasses to break up storms, one would think that any hurricanes or Cyclones that form are probably going to pick up quite some speed and power. Also considering how much energy it takes to warm or cool water, one would also think that the climate would be fairly stable because it would take a lot of energy to change the temperature of the water which in part drives weather patterns
so there's a hypothetical mystery island far far to the south where the GSR'S foot is propped up enough to disrupt currents and ice to start forming around around it
The kanoka Ross example really makes this feel like a class being taught in universe, I love it
I feel like the ecology of Mata Nui would make for a fun video
This was real impressive, thanks for going to deep into it!
I always love seeing videos from this channel. Scratches an itch in my brain
This also means that we now know where Mata Nui crashed when he arrived on Aqua Magna and where Voya Nui should be on the map.
Bro!! Awesome!! We need a detailed video (or multiple😁) on the comparison it shares with Aqua Magna and such. Like size and impact ect.
Always amazes me what details one can gleam from such a small amount of information.
I love Bionicle, I love sience, need I say more?🥰 Also: love all the pictures you explained everything with, almost like a documentary. And just to put that out there, 11:00 did you say "fluids like the air"?
I did indeed. While we usually think of "fluid" as just another word for "liquid", in a scientific context a fluid is just something that can flow and easily change shape, so air actually is a fluid by that definition.
LoL
Good video and you were right with the position of mata-nui,there is a total overview story picture released with fabers files where he shows the places where the storyline occurs.Mata-nui on that map of aqua magna is slightly tilted like you suggested in this video.
oh this is splendid! I always imagined Mata Nui was just like that because of Energized Protodermis but it really can exist like that! gotta wonder if all of this was stuff they considered when originally designing the map?
I thought this video was going to be about the geography of a random pacific island. Interesting to see the thought put into a lego setting.
Topic suggestion: how much energy did Teridax need in order to shapeshift from Dume to his Winged Titan form? General mass to energy stuff, but maybe fun. Though to be fair he did also absorb people for that and use some of their mass.
Excellent video and conclusion! I had been wondering for a while about this very subject. I basically got to the same conclusion about the prevailing winds but didn’t remember that pohatu referred to po-Koro as being in the north, so I didn’t feel confident in assuming the mata-Nui map was oriented north south. So thanks for making this video, you’ve finally brought closure to this question for me.
A great video!
Was going to watch that 9 hour lore video saw this uploaded 1hr ago to no views. It’s cool as hell there’s actually a dedicated community to bionicals.
Now I have to wonder if this all lines up nicely by coincidence or if every detail was meticulously planned when the creatives behind the Bionicle team were setting all the details down whenever these decisions were made.
Bionicleis one of those franchises where it would have been SO easy to just half ass it, yet the lore keeps piling up.
That was a very good educational video
Coriolis for the win! I learned about those winds from the Bell Television Magic Screen, Unchained Goddess. In fact, your description of the Kanoka Toss Matoran is almost identical to the Ferris wheel used in the Unchained Goddes episode. By chance was that part of your research when creating this video?
That's not one I've heard of, no. My research for that part was mostly based on explanations used the the KZhead channel for the UK MET Office
@@theknowledgetower208What a coincidence then! Ah, it matters not. Still gave me a kick in the nostalgia, so I still count it as a win. Thank you for these videos you make.
I think one other thing I'm considering about the climate is how the island is located relative to the ITCZ (the band of low pressure around the equator) the ITCZ can fluxuate throughout the year (which results in the monsoonal climate in a lot of places in Asia). Based on the lack of evidence for this on the island, I would believe the island to be a decent distance away from the equator (maybe like 10 degrees south or so). With that being said I'm just a novice worldbuilder and I'm could be very wrong
This, like so many of your videos, is really impressive. I am confused about one thing though: why is it that when you didn't want to assume north was up (the stipulation that started you on the calculations), you then assumed north was up on the star system concept art?
cause if we don't make some assumptions we won't be able to get anywhere with this limited information
It was basically because north needed to be "facing the camera" in that concept art for the winds to line up with the other evidence. It had to be looking either at the north pole or the south pole as it was showing the direction of rotation, which by definition is around the poles. And if it was looking at the south pole, then the winds wouldn't line up with the other evidence and we couldn't come to a good conclusion. That, plus it was made by a European who is used to north being up in maps, led to the assumption.
@@theknowledgetower208 That's fair, and I get it. It just seemed inconsistent to declare it shouldn't be assumed once, only to assume it later. That's all. But I get it. Again, impressive work.
@@MrTreefoz it was a valid point to raise regardless, I definitely could've been clearer on that.
The Coriolis effect demonstration is somewhat off. Though I can definitely see how using the simplified approach still captures the meat of the idea, and is still useful as such, it's without mention that in order to get that straight line trajectory Takua's sprite would have needed to aim at an exaggerated angle against the rotation of the planet to cancel out that portion of movement. But again, the idea was still captured well enough. Well done.
Yeah, that part was what I struggled with the most in the video to be honest
Great video! One question - Is it never stated in canon that the sun rises in the east on Aqua Magna? If it were, wouldn't that mean that the prevailing winds would go the other way, meaning we'd have to rotate Mata Nui the other direction to get the desired effect?
I wasn't able to find any references to what direction Solis Magna rose in from any of the written media - I performed word searches on the words east, west, north, south and sun on the digitised version of the story on wall of history and didn't find anything (thank Mata Nui there is an easily searchable version of the canon now!)
Here’s an idea when you get to explain the depths of Aqua magna, why not use the great spirit robot to determine that I wouldn’t be surprised at some parts of the 2007 storyline was on the underwater parts of the robot
So Voya Nui is in a more temperate region, then. Depending on what latitude it ends up at, its coastal ice belt might imply that Aqua Magna has a rather cold climate. (Perhaps Voya Nui's interior is warmed by the Mask of Life and/or Mt Valmai.)
For the tropics, I would put them in a similar latitude to Polynesia I know not every part is in the tropics, but considering all Polynesian words that were used in Bionicle plus a fan site in the beginning of the franchise that want to contest, I think using that as a plausible also, wouldn’t there be larger storms because of the lack of land
Amazing! Next step would be to somehow find out across which latitudes the island spans, and compare with sizes of the GSR and Aqua Magna. Then a similar investigation into the climate of Voya Nui would be possible, and at which latitudes the GSR's feet were located. Mata Nui might have had cold feet the entire time he was asleep if it was in the antarctic section of AM. ^^' I have one question: Your final determination of the islands orientation comes from equating the southwestern prevailing winds with the direction the wind and moisture must come from to form the island's biomes. But I'm wondering, wouldn't the exact orientation of the prevailing winds be affected by the planet's exact orbital rotation speed? My intuitive understanding would be that they would be more parallel to the equator if a planet rotates fast, and oriented more in the N-S direction on a planet with low rotation speeds. Of course they'd still be roughly southwestern, but not necessarily exactly 45°. So I'm asking: What is the justification for assuming the prevailing winds are oriented exactly 45° relative to the equator? Or does that always have to be and I have an error in my reasoning?
I based the angle of deflection on that of the Earth's atmosphere. You are right that the angle of deflection is affected by the speed of rotation, but because this is a relatively weak effect you would need quite a large difference in rotation speed to really see any difference, something on the scale of an order of magnitude. If we assume the same rotation for Aqua Magna as for Spherus Magna of 36 hours (which I have reasons for but will go into in far more detail in a future video, but its largely to explain factors like a day in the MU and a day on Aqua Magna seemingly being the same length, and that you couldn't ever see Bara/Bota Magna in the sky) then that's close enough to the 24 hour rotation of the Earth to be in (roughly) the same ballpark
Could this map still work if you moved Ta-Wahi? Also what kind of conditions would you need for frequent lightning storms?
What would the actual angle of rotation be for the final compass on the map? For replication purposes 👀
27 degrees anti-clockwise
@@theknowledgetower208 👍👍👍
So it’s extreme Hawaii, desert jungle tundra and volcanoes
But i got a question what could be the effects of the world being mostly cover in water?
Get the video that is interesting one could Voya nui being bad place climate for wise and the second, considering that it’s been confirmed that most of the plant was created by energize pro dermis which made it habitable for the Matrin maybe you can determine what the island looks like under normal circumstances before Mata nui leaves to go to another planet
Given the opposite rotation of the planet both west and east should've been swapped on the compass
While I can see your point, that’s not the case here. Historically, east and west were defined by where the sun rose, with east being where it rose and west being where it set. So, if we were purely using that definition, then what you say would be true and I should’ve swapped them around. But the definitions of east and west have been refined for when talking about astronomical bodies other than just the Earth. According to modern definitions, east and west are defined not by where the sun rises on a planet, but by their related orientation to north and south. If you are facing north, then east is always to the right, and west is always to the left - and vice versa if you are facing south. This means that the real question becomes how do you define north and south? There are two different schools of thought of this, the method that compares north and south against the invariable plane of the planets solar system (which is the currently accepted method used by the International Astronomical Union), or the “right hand” rule which uses the planet and its rotation independent of the rest of the solar system to define north and south (which is an older method, but still used in some places). I’d recommend these links if you want to know more about both methods, they can explain it better than I can in a comment (and you can see how north and south can be different in both definitions for the same planet depending upon how the planet is rotating compared to the rest of its solar system - it’s a pretty cool read) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poles_of_astronomical_bodies www.astronomy.com/science/ask-astro-how-do-we-distinguish-north-and-south-poles-on-other-planets/ But for Aqua Magna, we know it has to be in the orientation given in the video at 12:09. As the video explains, the island has to be in the orientation that is depicted in that image, otherwise the prevailing winds wouldn’t match up to where they needed to be for the rain shadow explanation of the islands geography to work. Also, in order for that to work, then the planet needs to be spinning in the opposite direction to the Earth, again as explained in the video. But we know from canon that Po-Wahi needs to be facing roughly north. So, if we take all of this into account alongside the fact that east and west should be defined in relation to their position relative to north and south rather than where the sun rises or sets, then east and west have to be in the direction they were given on the map in the video and therefore Solis Magna has to rise in the west and set in the east. Hope that makes sense.
😊👍