There's a lot of stuff that we just take on faith in Game of Thrones—like how anyone thought the Snow’s Seven wight heist was an even slightly good idea—and one thing we’ve all just accepted is that the story takes place on a planet where great minds have conquered the building of magnificent structures, the creation of deadly poisons, and the harnessing of dark magic, but no one’s been able to accurately predict the seasons. Winter is here, but no one seems to know how long it’ll stick around. Enter science.
University of Bristol researchers published a paper (helpfully translated into Dothraki and High Valerian) called “The Climate of the world of Game of Thrones.” The faux-journal article is credited to Westeros’ resident bookworm, Sam Tarly. The climate model they created suggests that Casterly Rock’s weather is similar to that of Houston, while at The Wall the climate’s more like that of Lapland. It also suggests that their years-long winters are explained by the planet’s “tumbling” tilt away from the sun. So there you go. Hopefully some of science’s great minds will next turn their efforts towards explaining the biology of northern ice zombies.