The Wumbian Archipelago

The Wumbian Archipelago is an extremely isolated collection of landmasses settled between the Peaceable's and Spectral Oceans in extreme southwestern Sheatheria (see main map, further above). It is a strange world of secrets, untouched and virginal, since the beginning of time.

Wumbus, and neighboring landmasses, owe their extreme isolation to a very unique fluke of Sheatherian plate tectonics. At some point over the planet's 6 billion year amassed life, an unusual tectonic plate cracked off from some larger plate in a massive overhaul of the planet's crust, and begin to drift independently among the seas of molten magma which make up Sheatheria's mantle. Known as Vertigona - the broken little plate which, by all logic, should quickly have either quickly burnt up or subjugated beneath its larger brethren - it managed instead to find itself locked in a gear-like rotation, trapped between a number of other tectonic plates, without being upheaved over or underneath them. As a result of this even wear on all sides, the "little plate which could" has since over the millenia worn into a nearly circular shape. It is so that, unlike all other known tectonic plates, Vertigona instead has come  - not to crash against and apart from the others in the crust, but rather to spin on its own axis in a slow but steady counter-clockwise circle, turning 180 degrees roughly every 70 million years, between, in the modern day, three other tectonic plates.

Located almost centrally upon the plate, which broke off approximately 850 million years ago, the archipelago is the only portion of the entire Virtigionian plate to rest above sea level in the modern day - and as a result, it has been left for its entire existence as the plate's only emersed series of landmasses. Due to the wide expanses of sea which therefor surround it, and have always surrounded it since long before even the earliest of life, the landmasses of the Wumbian archipelago have never met the shores of another continent, and have drifted in complete isolation from surrounding land since their very earliest creation. This has resulted in an incredibly isolated, endemic, and diverse ecology unlike any seen elsewhere on the backwards planet, a world populated only by the select few strong enough to swim, fly, or rarely, in more recent history, [i]ride,[/i] to its distant shores from distant mainlands and turbulent seas. Its largest landmass, the archetypical Wumbus, is a staggering 5,785 miles wide, and over four times as large as Australia. The smaller landmass of Mephlindus to its northeast, though nearest to any habitable continent, is still a staggering 6,300 miles from the aforementioned Isle of Xenolus to the northeast, a distance only the very strongest of ocean-feeding flyers or hitchhikers can cross - during past ages, when sea levels were higher, this distance may have been nearly 10,000 miles.