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In real life, the majority of Earth's land is in the Northern Hemisphere. The vast majority of people also live in the Northern Hemisphere. Essentially every important country (economics-wise and military-wise) in the past and present is not only in the Northern Hemisphere, but above the Tropic of Cancer!

I'm trying to build a different planet where lands and Cradles of Civilization have a larger geographic distribution. Here is an edited map I made:

Shifted Earth

Greenland and the British Isles are in heir original positions. Everything else is shifted down by 22 degrees (latitude). Antarctica is moved to the west of South America.The ice that otherwise formed on Antarctica instead stays as floating ice around the South Pole (similar to the North Pole).

Would this change increase the amount of arable land of Earth? Canada and Siberia would be less of a tundra. The Amazon and Congolian rainforests also probably won't exist. Australia would be colder. Antarctica would be a habitable continent now.

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    $\begingroup$ Siberia is mostly taiga (= forest), not so much tundra; the tundra is a clear minority. The same for Canada. The sea levels would be quite a bit higher, because the ice of Antarctica in now in the ocean; which means that the contours of the continents are incorrect: for example, there will be no Florida, no isthmus of Suez, and no Low Countries in Europe. Note that if the sea level is just 27 meters higher than what we have now the Black Sea connects to the Caspian... $\endgroup$
    – AlexP
    Commented Jul 7 at 17:06
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    $\begingroup$ Your title and the body of your post don't line up... I think. You can't make the Tropic of Cancer the equator because, kinda by definition, the equator is at the center line of the planet and it's a region due to the axial tilt. So your title doesn't make any sense at all. The body of your post talks about moving continents around, which makes much more sense. Are you really only asking about a placement-modified map? If so, please edit your post to remove all the Tropic of Cancer references. Thanks. $\endgroup$
    – JBH
    Commented Jul 7 at 19:15
  • $\begingroup$ All of this could be much easier solved by dumping a small sea or a very big lake in the middle of Sahara. A large part of Sahara is already a depression: if it was filled with water, the surrounding area would become superb farmland. You can do the same to every desert which is now below sea level, to more than double arable land, $\endgroup$
    – Going Durden
    Commented Jul 8 at 7:59
  • $\begingroup$ @JBH I'm talking about moving the new planet's equator to Earth's current Tropic of Cancer. If you look closely on the map, the all latitude lines are shifted up by 22 degrees (I moved the continents down). $\endgroup$
    – Rhymehouse
    Commented Jul 8 at 15:41
  • $\begingroup$ @Rhymehouse What he's saying is that your words make no sense. You can't just arbitrarily change the name of a line, and expect plants to grow. For example, I am in the USA. if I rename my office to England, I am not somehow actually in England. $\endgroup$
    – Tony Ennis
    Commented Jul 8 at 18:23

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This could increase the overall amount of arable land, but only modestly. It puts many of currently existing agricultural zones - places such as much of the USA and Canada, all of Europe except Scandinavia, and the whole Central Asian steppe - right around the tropic of Cancer, just where you would expect major deserts to develop. It also puts much of South Brazil and Argentina in the rain shadow of the Andes, effectively dragging the Patagonian desert northwards. And also it leaves south Africa and the southern half of Australia surrounded by now much colder polar seas, which too would make these places less agriculturally productive. On the other hand more of the land area would be suitable for growing rice, and rice can achieve higher yields than the temperate climate crops such as wheat or corn. So overall it would be a mixed picture.

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    $\begingroup$ This, plus Rain Forests in a lot of places that currently grow a lot of rice, and you can't just clear that cover and farm anyway the rainfall volume in that biome strips the soil of nutrients and biomass in as little as 12 months. $\endgroup$
    – Ash
    Commented Jul 8 at 6:39
  • $\begingroup$ @Ash, thank you. Fortunately, things are not quite so grim. Rain is not a problem for rice, which is a wetland grass and loves water. Luckily for us, wetlands have their own mechanisms to replace fertility which do not depend on forest cover, or on nutrients already present in the soil. In this way, as long as you stick to suitable farming practices, rice fields can stay fertile in a rainforest climate for millenia, as indeed they did in places like Indonesia in our own world. $\endgroup$
    – ihaveideas
    Commented Jul 8 at 8:17
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    $\begingroup$ Yes wetlands do, rainforests don't have any soil fertility to start with though. $\endgroup$
    – Ash
    Commented Jul 9 at 5:15
  • $\begingroup$ @Ash, thank you. Yes, and we can convert much of the rainforest into rice paddies - i.e. artificial wetlands - which turn these vast areas of infertile soil into the world's bread baskets. It's very simple too, the preindustrial peoples routinely did it with nothing more than shovels, buckets and their own hands. Ain't that lucky? ;) $\endgroup$
    – ihaveideas
    Commented Jul 9 at 15:52
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    $\begingroup$ There have been some successes in that area, but to my knowledge only in areas of high relief where what you might call climax rainforest could never become fully established. Argentina and Brazil on the other hand have had absolute disasters attempting to follow suit on cleared flat lands. $\endgroup$
    – Ash
    Commented Jul 10 at 7:25
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No

Since there is more land in the northern hemisphere than in the south, this look like a great idea in paper, but the most produtive arable lands are placed near the tropics and not around the equator. The equatorial climate are not only to hot for most cultures but also are often to dry or to moist, forming only barren deserts or dense jungles that are usually described as wastelands. Moving the equator that far north will destroy more fertile land than will create. As mentioned in another answer, expect intense desertification in North America and across Eurasia and much of South America and Australia becoming too cold for agriculture.

But maybe a less drastic change, moving the continents about 20% of the distance you are proposing, could be beneficial...

If you are creating a completely fictional world just using Earth as a base for inspiration, and you want there to be more areas suitable for argiculture... My advice is to add more land close to the tropics and remove land close to the poles. Just avoid letting an ocean current cross the planet in equatorial latitudes, which can cause problems with convergence zones.

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There is a problematic assumption in this question: you are moving the continents around on a mercator projection, which is very different from adjusting the earth by tilting it 'southwards' (basically, rotating the earth sideways in space).

This might put the biggest landmass (Asia) further south, but would also move the continent on the other side of the globe (North/South America) further north.

Let's say you're some godlike entity. You stop time at noon in Islamabad (roughly east-west center of the eurasian continent) on the 21st of June. Then, you 'move' the earth's equator so that the new equator touches the two tropics (the northern one 10 degrees below Islamabad, the southern one roughly 3000km in the ocean west of Chile). You change the earth's spin so that it now spins around its new axis, shifted 23 degrees north, changing the astronimical date from 21st of June to 21st of October (or March).

The half-way point of these coordinates would be the equator on the Atlantic ocean, in front of Liberia (17 degrees west, 0 degrees north). Everything up to 180 degrees west of this point would move northwards, everything east of this point moves southwards.

On the balance of things, it would create more agricultural land. In a human timescale though, such an alteration would have devastating consequences for the life currently on earth, which can't just 'pack up and go' somewhere else. If it happened over a few thousand years, no problem. New virgin rainforest and arable soils require hundreds of years to form. The Gobi and Sahara won't turn into lush rainforest even if it started raining a lot there for quite some time.

In contrast, a bunch of existing rainforest (the Amazon?) would move into the horse latitudes, become starved off its water supply, and mostly die off in a manner of years.

This is the problem with climate change: not necessarily that the climate changes, but how fast it happens.

If you're a bit more creative than that, there's ways you can tilt the earth for more forest climates, here's an example of what someone managed to do:

https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/3zmrc1/the_biomes_of_a_tilted_earth_oc_1204x840/

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