The Northern Hemisphere

Lore & Background

Before the bombs fell, the Northern Hemisphere was the industrial and political heart of the old civilization. Its cities, highways, and farmlands lay in ruins long before the first 100 touched down, their concrete skeletons slowly swallowed by moss, vine, and the slow creep of forest. The nuclear winter that followed stripped the atmosphere of its warmth for a generation, and the survivors who never left orbit—those on the Ark—came to believe the surface was permanently dead. The decision to send the first hundred down was, in the eyes of the Ark's leadership, an act of desperate faith in a planet they had not seen in decades.

Those who had remained on the ground, however, had adapted. The Skaara Clans, divided by color-coded banners and ancestral river valleys, built a theocratic society around the worship of the 'Grounders' old gods and the memory of the war. The Mountain Men, harder and more militaristic, held the high passes and traded in weapons and secrets. The City of Light, the most ambitious of the surface settlements, attempted to rebuild something resembling the old world's governance, complete with a council, a capital, and a standing army. Each of these powers viewed the 100's arrival through a different lens: as divine return, as invasion, or as a political opportunity to be exploited.

The hemisphere's geography dictates its politics. The dense forests offer concealment and foraging but limit large-scale agriculture. The river valleys support the Skaara Clans' rice paddies and communal living. The mountain passes are chokepoints that the Mountain Men control with brutal efficiency. And the open plains, while beautiful, offer no cover in a world where a single gunshot can echo for miles. As the series progresses, the Northern Hemisphere shifts from a place of survival to a place of empire-building, its borders redrawn by every alliance and every war.

In Their Own Story

The morning fog hadn't lifted off the river when I crested the ridge and saw the Ark hanging in the pale sky like a second moon. I'd been walking the northern trails for three days, following the old highway that still cut through the birch forest, and the silence out here was so total it pressed against my eardrums. Below, in the valley, the Skaara paddies caught the first light and turned gold. A child's laughter carried up on the wind—small, bright, utterly unbothered by the fact that the sky had a metal city in it. I sat down on a flat stone, still warm from the night's residual heat, and watched the water move. Seventy-five years of rain and root and patience, and the river had already swallowed the old bridge. I thought about the 100, about the way they'd stumbled into this world with their radios and their fear, and how the world had simply… continued. The river didn't care about their politics. The birch trees didn't care about the Ark's decrees. I pulled my canteen from my pack, drank, and started down the slope. There was work to do, and the fog was finally breaking.

Reader's Guide

You start at the Drop Zone, where the 100 first hit the dirt. The forest here is thick—birch and maple and oak tangled in a green canopy that filters the sun into shifting coins on the forest floor. The landing crater is barely visible now, just a slight dip in the moss where the trees lean away. Walk east and the trees thin into the river valley, where the Skaara Clans have tended their paddies for generations. The water is cold and fast, the banks soft with silt, and the smell of wet earth and rice is unmistakable. Each clan's territory is marked by color—red banners on the northern bank, blue on the southern—and the boundaries are as old as the clans themselves.

Push north and the land rises. The Mountain Men's country is all granite and scree, narrow passes where the wind screams off the peaks. Their outposts are carved into the rock, defensible, austere. You can see the old world's highways still, half-buried in scree, a reminder that someone once drove here in a car.

South of the valley, the plains open up. This is the City of Light's domain—wider, more structured, with cleared fields and a central settlement that glows amber at dusk. It's the closest thing to a 'city' you'll find, and the closest thing to a government. But every territory here is provisional. The Northern Hemisphere doesn't belong to anyone. It belongs to the next person who decides to stay.

Did You Know?

• The Northern Hemisphere's landscape in The 100 is a deliberate contrast to the Ark's sterile corridors: the show's visual language shifts from cold metal and fluorescent light to warm, organic, overgrown natural environm
• The Skaara Clans' color-coded divisions (Red, Blue, Yellow, Green, Black) are tied to specific river valleys and territories within the Northern Hemisphere, making geography a direct expression of political identity.
• The Mountain Men's control of high-altitude passes gives them a strategic monopoly on trade and movement, a power dynamic rooted entirely in the hemisphere's topography.
• The Ark remains visible in the Northern Hemisphere's sky throughout the series, serving as a constant visual reminder that the surface dwellers are being watched, judged, and ultimately abandoned by the people above.