Imagine that the ice planet Hoth from Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back was real. How could life evolve, let alone survive, on a planet entirely covered with snow and ice? Was it always that way, or did some great catastrophe strike the planet and cause it to freeze?
I had a lot of fun writing up this report, researching the science behind areas as diverse as ice worms to goats to cometary dust falling on oceans. Could such a movie world as Hoth really exist, along with its ice lizards and ferocious predators? The surprise comes from what the quest for an answer to this question tells us about our own planet.
hoth.pdf (500 KB)
hoth_small.pdf (229KB) – low resolution images