Terraformed Mars

From The Atlantic (yeah, I know) a not-too-terribly scientific look at what a terraformed Mars might look like.  Great pics:

The article ends by noting, "Looks like home, maybe a bit, just with a foreign geography."  Except it doesn't, really.  A terraformed Mars is going to have one giant super-continent.  Even if you assume any bit of land that touches another bit of land constitute one continent (making North and South America a single continent, as well as Eurasia and Africa) Earth still has four distinct land masses.  It also appears that a watery Mars is closer to a 50/50 split of surface area being water or land, as opposed to Earth's 70/30 split. 

I can't imagine that doesn't result in some really odd weather.  I do think the artist got it right that one half of that continent is really green (perhaps even waterlogged, like the Amazon) and the other half is pretty dry and barren; a watery Mars isn't necessarily going to be a green Mars.  I could also see a wet Mars experiencing something like an epic version of our monsoon pattern weather. 

Hexographer Hex-a-fies Anything!

Those of you looking to convert the more modern, suitable-for-framing style artsy world maps into traditional, suitable-for-hex-crawlin' maps might want to give this new feature in Hexographer a look:

Hexographer just got a new feature: Converting a map (or really any PNG image) into a hex map! This is designed to make it a little easier to create a hex map based on another map you’ve created or scanned.

And now I'm intrigued by the possibilities of hex-a-fying things that were not intended to be maps originally.