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    Default Update: Tectoncis, landmass, islands.

    Hey everyone. Here is an update based on all the great information and advice you guys posted, and blatant plagiarism of good ideas.
    First I redid the plate tectonics plagiarizing Akubra's idea, ok took inspiration for it was inspiring. From my perspective the tectonics work and I'm hoping with the positioning of the boundaries the relative rotation of the plates is visible. There is only two things I don't like about how I ave the tectonics set up and those are. 1. I have the divergent boundaries on the eastern hemisphere forming a giant circle. I would prefer to have this broken up and thought of making the southern convergent boundary a divergent one instead but then the boundary looked like a wave function and I didn't like that either. 2. The south western continent I wasn't sure if such a divergent boundary is possible, and it begs the question about what happens when a plate is squished between two parallel divergent boundaries. I may change this don't know yet.

    From there I adjusted the position and shaping of my landmasses. This took a while because I cut out each landmass and pasted it to it's own layer. After that I brought the pieces together into one giant landmass and readjusted the basic shape so they fit together. Then I mapped out a general path and initial rotation. Finally I brought the continent to their current position made the coastlines more realistic (I hope, I tried to take into account past influencing factors along with the tectonic boundaries in the area, so long smooth coastlines along divergent boundaries or where little tectonic interaction plays it's part.) and adjusted the convergent boundaries to fit the new coastlines and hopefully demonstrate rotation.

    I've noticed that fitting my continents together and breaking them back up helped me understand the plate tectonics better and helped with the landmass shape. If/when I make other world map in the future I think I am going to simply start with a single super continent and then break it up into different tectonic plates and map past movement to the positions I want it. It's handy because it also shows you where old mountain ranges are and old land formations and islands that wouldn't necessarily exist through the tectonic or landforms first method.

    Lastly I added islands. There are a few areas that I am going to redo, mostly the eastern portion of the northwestern continent the islands are too dense, too big or both. There is one area (sadly I forgot to label) east of the northwestern continent that I need to fix so it doesn't look like a circle of islands, it looks weird. I've redone this area a bunch of times yet it always looks circular. I'm thinking of leaving maybe one or two. There are still a few areas that need islands, these are going to be the older islands of past tectonic convergent boundaries that may not exist at present. Mostly these old islands are along the western coasts of the two western continents, and along the south eastern coast. In some areas I will probably split them to either side of the divergent boundary.

    Red: divergent boundaries.
    Blue: subduction boundaries.
    Purple: convergent boundaries.
    Green: Transform boundaries.
    Click image for larger version. 

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    One thing. In the northeastern section I have three narrow plates stacked against each other. My reasoning is due to past position of the plates and the super-continent a divergent fault snaked it's way partially into a single plate in that area creating three different plates. More recently the divergent boundary is shifted north and the resulting pressure from the western to northern divergent boundary has caused fracturing due to stress and and plate movement. Think it works?
    Last edited by ascanius; 05-31-2014 at 05:29 AM.

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