WIP world map (name TBA)

[Aileron]

Hello everyone!

After much fear of not doing it right the first time I got the nerve to post for real. I am working on a full world map I have a couple continents in mind and had a lot of issues (like many) with plates. Truthfully I am not worried about them being perfect, but believable. Once I have them down I am confident the rest will fall into place. In order to get started I took what I wanted and went to gplates and tried to fill in the rest. From there I took the image in rectangle to color. Red is for primarily converging, White for divergent, and orange for transforming. Green dots are for known plates I plan on being continental.

Also I am super newbie to art formats and all, if I screw up the post or image please forgive me.

Thank you for your time.

[Jean-Abdel]

Actually, there aren't continental and oceanic plates, most plates are both continental an oceanic. Your plates looks good, nothing to say about that but what are the black boundaries on the left and right edges of your map? And als, are your arrows reprensentative of the speed? All the movements look ok, nothing to say about that.

[Gidde]

Congrats on posting your first WIP Have some rep.

I second asking what the black outline is; other than that they look pretty good. Also, what is gplates? Did I miss a plate tectonics program somewhere before I got on the no-plates wagon?

[Aileron]

I apologize. In my excitement at it all almost coming together I ignored the black section. It is a 'smaller' plate that I could not make a choice on in my excitement. The arrows are for direction, the speed was not a part of the equation yet.

Renewed with some positive feed back from a group I was afraid would tear it to pieces I will try to get another draft done soon! Doing research on maping and worldbuilding I came across gplates, it's an opensource program for plate tectonics, while I do not plan on going overboard I really knew it could be helpful for putting the parts together on a sphere instead of a rectangle. And Gidde, I really tried to do no-plates, my inner scientist kept throwing a fit at being put in the corner

[Gidde]

I totally get it, really. I went no-plates because I got so lost in that rabbithole I made no maps for a very long time hehe. If you can do plates and still get mapping done, all power to ya! I may just grab that program though ....

[Tiluchi]

Ooh, this is going to be fun! I'm a huge fan of these "ground-up" worldbuilding projects. I think starting with the plates rather than continent outlines is a smart idea, as it prevents you from getting too wedded to continent designs that end up being unrealistic. I'm also particularly impressed that your polar plates don't look weird and distorted.

If I had one critique of the tectonics so far, it would be that the J plate seems to be essentially surrounded by convergent margins, which I think would cause so much stress to the plate that part of it would rift away. I think the least realistic part there is that plates I and J seem to be moving in the exact same direction- in terms of plate movement that seems unrealistic, though I'm not sure what the history you worked out on GPlates is. If I had a suggestion it might be to change the directions of plates I, J, or G a little bit so that at least some of the margins there are transform or divergent rather than convergent.

Additionally, plate K looks a little odd in its current form- to the best of my knowledge, there aren't usually divergent margins between oceanic and continental plates, or convergent margins between two oceanic plates. Perhaps it would make sense to make it a continental plate that rifted off of I?

This looks like a great start, excited to see where it goes! I'm sure some of the true experts will have something to say that's smarter than what I can offer anyway.

[Jean-Abdel]

Actually, a plate can be surrounded by convergent margins without rifting away, like Philippine plate. Moving in the exact same direction is okay but if they also have the same speed, they will merge together. As I said before, there's no continental and oceanic plates, only continental and oceanic crust and plates are usually made of both, so there's no problem with a plate with only oceanic crust rifting from another holding a continent, like Antarctic and Pacific plates. Oceanic-oceanic convergence is very usual and creates island arcs, see Japan, Philippine and the Antilles.

[Aileron]

Merry Monday!

I got some free time to fill in a few of the broad strokes for the landmasses and added them in blue. All feedback is appreciated. Please keep in mind that the islands are more temporary markers than islands to size at this moment. I think the next draft after this will be resized and in better detail, and hopefully a preliminary elevation map.

[Jean-Abdel]

First, we still don't know what are the boundary types of the black plate, and even though it's not very hard to deduce it would be appreciated. The map looks fine but the big continent on the right is a bit weird, if it's the junction of 3 continents that were on different plates it should not look like that, especially the part that is on G. Think of them as different continents that merdged together, not as a single continent with convergent boundaries passing through it.

However there is one exception to that rule, but it don't apply to your world: when to big plates are colliding one in the other, the plate that stays over the other one may break into many smaller ones right at the boudary (the remainder of that big plate won't form microplates, only at the boundary, look at the list of microplates on wikipedia). In this case there will be many microplates (some of them aren't that small like the Amur and okhotsk ones) holding a small piece of the continent, and forming weird landforms like the Altiplano or all the islands of Indonesia. Here it doesn't aplly as the G and I plates aren't microplates and are actually the big ones colliding into J.

[Aileron]

Hey!

So I did a tweak to the I-G-J joint and updated the black faults on that small plate. I am thinking you might be right that I and J do/did kindof fuse together to make one large plate and G is more hitting that fusing plate, something like India hitting Eurasia.