> That said, this is pretty cool. It's made me think how for humans and many other animals, moving 10, 100, even thousands of kilometers horizontally is not a very big deal. But move vertically, and you effectively find yourself in a different world within as little as a few hundred meters.

This observation reminded me of 'Dragon's Egg', the SF novel about a civilization on the surface of a neutron star. Because of the intense magnetic field, movement in the east-west direction was easy but very difficult in the north-south direction.