Shadow Space, Gaia.
To maintain the ecological environment, this artificially customized planet also had seasonal changes like a natural world. Gaia's Northern Hemisphere was now in the dead of deep winter. Cold air from the Arctic Circle crossed the icy ocean belt and two narrow continental mountain ranges, bringing ceaseless frigid winds to seventy percent of the Northern Hemisphere. As the largest body of water in the Northern Hemisphere, the North Sea was directly connected to the Arctic ice-ocean belt. A continuous glacier stretching over a thousand kilometers extended from the Arctic Circle all the way into the depths of the North Sea. This glacier would remain from winter until the following spring, nearly half a planetary year, before gradually melting and retreating back toward the Arctic region after summer arrived in the Northern Hemisphere. And now was the glacier's peak season. Standing at its edge, one faced an endless dark-blue sea; turning around, one saw an unbroken continent of solid ice stretching all the way to the pole. Beneath one's feet lay a ten-thousand-foot ice cliff that trembled constantly, as though it might shatter at any moment. Countless massive ice floes drifting near the glacier formed moving island chains that could last for months. Driven by ocean currents, they traveled from the warmer depths of the North Sea to this thousand-mile glacier, repeatedly crashing against the sturdy ice cliff beneath our feet. Every collision brought tremors and thunderous roars like a mountain collapse and ground fissure. Shattered ice fragments were swept high into the air by the gale, scattering like a blizzard. Occasionally, sharp icicles would be shaken loose from the great glacier, plunging into the sea and raising huge waves, yet every impact still helped the glacier grow larger. Collision, vibration, shattering, growth—the glacier that stretched here from