In Principio

[Corvus Marinus]

Better?

I've adjusted the motions of the plates…. Still not sure about some of the boundaries, especially on 1, 3, and 9. I've got a ring of divergent faults circling the globe and branching along the south border of 2. Something doesn't look right to me, but I'm not sure how to correct it.

[Hai-Etlik]

Really all plate movement is rotation. The difference is where the axis of rotation is relative to the centre of the plate. When the plate is "rotating" its axis of rotiation is near it. When it's "translating" the axis of rotation is far away.

To get tectonics right you really have to think in terms of being on a sphere. No map you can draw of an entire globe, or even an entire hemisphere can possibly preserve the direction of movement of tectonic plates so you really can't plan this out on a map. You really need a globe. A ball that you can draw on with a marker is the best way to accomplish this. Polystyrene craft balls are a possibility. Doing this in your head is REALLY hard and doing it with a map is just going to mislead you so get a ball, scribble on your ideas, figure out the converging, diverging, transverse faults, reshape the faults to fit what they are doing, (Transverse faults are circular arcs, usually very big ones that look like "straight lines" over the distance you see them, rift zones are usually arcs of great circles (the spherical equivalent of straight lines) broken up by transverse faults perpendicular to them, particularly along ocean floors. Subduction zones tend to bulge out toward the subducting plate, particularly if the overriding plate is oceanic, and continental convergent zones may retain the bulged arc from when the oceanic plate between them subducted away.