My Mountains Have Fallen and They Can't Get Up

[Porklet]

You don't generally get long skinny plates, particularly not with a constricted portion in the middle. Both the continental part of a plate, and plates as a whole, tend to be compact shapes because bits that stick out tend to snap off.

Coastlines generally follow the continental margin fairly closely, but you can have a few deviations to produce "continental" seas (Knowing where your continental margins are would be a big help, continental seas are often great fishing grounds like the Grand Banks).

I though as much. I am redrawing the plates to be smaller and will combine A2 and C to a degree. When you say "continental seas" do mean when a tectonic plate that contains both land and a significant portion of an ocean?

I am going to have to work on the plates involved with the major continent first. Many of the islands you see have not been dealt with, and they are supposed to be volcanic in origin (as you might have guessed). I will consider what you and Hawksguard have said and repost a new map tomorrow. I just got home and have to be back at work in less than 7 hours. Keeping the major plates in place but breaking them down into smaller components might be the best alternative.

In regards to the barriers you mentioned. The area south of the mountains on the northern reaches of D is an expansive savannah and large portion that resembles the Kalahari desert. it's already a formidable barrier. I am not so concerned with how impassable the mountains are just as long as they create a rain shadow.

EDIT: I forgot to thank you for your help. Thanks.

[Hai-Etlik]

I though as much. I am redrawing the plates to be smaller and will combine A2 and C to a degree. When you say "continental seas" do mean when a tectonic plate that contains both land and a significant portion of an ocean?

There are two kinds of crust that make up the plates. The thick but relatively light continental plate, and the thinner but much denser oceanic plate. The oceanic plate is the stuff that fills in the gaps when plates spread apart. Some plates are all oceanic, while others are continental, with bits of oceanic plate hanging off the edges.

Now, all oceanic plate is covered with water except where really tall mountains stick up out of it. Continental plate is mostly above water, but around the edges it drops off a bit and is covered with water. This frill of water covered continent is called a continental shelf. Sometimes a larger area, possibly reaching far inland, is flooded, and that's a continental sea.

At Oceanic-Continental convergent boundaries (where they are coming together) the oceanic plate "subducts" underneath and the ocean floor gets scraped up along the front edge of the continent. There isn't really much of a shelf in this case. The west coast of North America between southern BC and northern California (the Cascadia Subduction Zone) is a clear example of this. It has multiple parallel chains of mountains, frequent earthquakes, occasional MASSIVE ones, and volcanoes mixed in with the mountains.

At Oceanic-Oceanic convergent boundaries, you get similar subduction, but instead of mountains, you get a deep trench, and then a chain of volcanoes behind that which may reach up to form islands. Earthquakes are the same as for subduction under a continent: frequent, and occasionally huge.

Continental-Continental boundaries result in both being forced up into HUGE mountains. Without the subduction, you don't get the volcanoes or the really big earthquakes, though you still get the smaller quakes.

Then there are the crazy complicated parts like the Mediterranean basin or the west edge of the Pacific.