 From the 20th century to the age of the Kar-Rah, the planet's landscape as changed in all of the following ways EXCEPT:
The edges of that almost bottomless pool were caked with a rim of white—for the water, on which dead birds so often floated, was surcharged with alkali. The ripples that had ruffled the surface waters in the Pit, quieted again to glassy smoothness. The icy breeze tore tiny puffs of dust from grotesque, angling drifts of soil, nearly waterless for eons. A launching catapult for the last space ships built by the gods in exodus, perhaps it was—half a million years ago. Glacial ages, war, decadence, disease, and a final scattering of those ultimate superhumans to newer worlds in other solar systems, had done that. Loy Chuk had flown his geological expedition out from the far lowlands to the east, out from the city of Kar-Rah. A mineral saturation that had held time and change in stasis. A perfect preservative for organic tissue, aided probably during most of those passing eras by desert dryness. Not the star-conquering demi-gods, but the ancestral stock that had built the first machines on Earth, and in the early Twenty-first Century, the first interplanetary rockets. A strange accident, happening in a legendary antiquity, had aided them in their quest for knowledge. Medical and biological sciences were far advanced among Loy Chuk's kind. It might move, speak, remember its past! A tremendous sand desert, marked with low, washed-down mountains, and the vague, angular, geometric mounds of human cities that were gone forever.
 Vegetation can only be harvested inside glass domes
 Vegetation can only be harvested inside glass domes  North America is an expansive desert continent  Cities are gone and species have moved underground  The Atlantic Ocean has disappeared