WIP: Adeia - tectonic feedback appreciated

[dewrad]

Hi all! I'm a long-time lurker, but I think this is my first actual proper post. Given the overlap between worldbuilders and conlangers, I dare say there are already a fair few members that I'll already know...

Below is a map of my conworld, until recently named Telmona. It dissatisfies me, for a number of reasons.



The distribution of the continents looks implausible, as do their shapes. The relief seems to be almost at random. Also, I'm a bit of an obsessive completist: it frustrates me that I can't reliably predict where (say) coal deposits are, or whether the White Chalklands of Mailona are in fact likely to be made of chalk rather than basalt. Therefore, I've decided to have a go at starting again from scratch, but this time beginning by modelling the tectonic history of the world.

Below is an animation running from 250mya to the present, showing the breakup of the Adeian equivalent of Pangaea. This is the result of a couple of weeks messing around with GPlates, mainly teaching myself how to use the program and learning about plate mechanics.



My planned workflow is to get the motions of the continents right first, then start building the relief and the non-continental areas - the shapes of the continents I'm not wedded to. I'm (relatively) satisfied with the general outline, but there are a few things I'm not sure about:

• The light blue continent travels hair-raisingly fast, although this could just be the result of my limited GPlates skills
• Most of the plates are roughly the same size, rather than being fractal. However, once I start building up the relief map of the world, I do anticipate adding more minor plates to the model.
• Is this just plausible in general?

Basically, any feedback would be greatly appreciated: I'm a linguist, not a geologist so I'm sure I've messed up! I've attached the .rot file and the the gpml file for GPlates should anyone wish to have a play with them.

Thanks for reading!