Quote Originally Posted by briarth0rn View Post
Is there a source on the 'Thanalan turned into a desert due to a calamity' idea? I hear people say this a lot, but I'm not sure where exactly it comes from.
It comes from Encyclopedia Eorzea:
Recent discoveries of the skeletons of large plant-eating fauna in the Grand Wake have some scholars convinced that Thanalan's modern-day deserts were once a lush grassland lost in the fires of the calamity that ended in the Second Astral Era.
That being said, the encyclopedia is written in-universe and isn't necessarily correct about everything. Considering how much (randomly thrown in from different places in the real world) desert flora exists there, the area must have at least always had a propensity for dryness. Thanalan could also be like the real world Sahara which alternates between desert and grassland depending on the climate