The Southern Park is the protected wilderness occupying the southern end of Coriopolis. It comprises the entire southern end-cap together with a strip of the cylinder roughly ten kilometers wide that abuts Ring Lake to the north.

Extent#

The park covers about six hundred square kilometers of lowland — the circumferential strip, which at the habitat’s radius wraps some sixty kilometers around the cylinder — plus a further five hundred square kilometers of slopes and mountainous ground on the cap itself. Jagged ravines cut the southern end, the most spectacular of them holding Scimitar Falls.

The gradient of the cap is what makes the mountainous ground possible. Effective gravity falls with distance from the rotation axis, so terrain rising toward the cap’s centre is climbing into progressively lighter conditions, and slopes can be carried steeper and higher than the same rock would stand under uniform gravity.

Settlement#

The park is the least developed region of the habitat. Only a few thousand above-ground cabins are scattered through it, concentrated in its northern portion near the lake; the southern forest proper is unsettled. There is no permanent resident population of consequence, and access is managed rather than free.

Administration#

The park is administered by a game warden’s office responsible for the condition of the habitat’s engineered ecosystem as a whole, not merely for its protected portion. The post is conventionally held by someone from the ecological engineering side of the habitat’s construction rather than from land management, on the reasoning that a wholly designed biosphere is maintained rather than merely protected — see Rusty Menefee and dissipative adaptation in gyrealm ecosystems.

The park was the southern terminus of the seismic energy released in the bombing crisis: one of the two reconstituted wavefronts ran into the southern cap, and the emergency channels and holding ponds cut into the cap’s slopes carried water for the first time since their commissioning tests.