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!

[Charerg]

Overall this looks very promising for a first attempt, the breakup process seems quite plausible even from my pedantic perspective, though there are some things that may be a bit off. If you want to invest a lot of time and effort into building up the tectonic model, there are some advanced GPlates techniques demonstrated in my tutorial on the subject, that can be utilized to improve the model.

Now, as to your question:

The "light blue" moving fast seems quite acceptable to me, this could be a continent similar to India, a fast-moving piece under the effect of slab pull. If anything, it makes things more realistic to have different plates moving at different velocities depending on the tectonic forces affecting them. Though if you want to check whether the plate velocities are plausible relative to the velocities of our Earthly plates, there's a tool for that in GPlates as well (check the tutorial for more info).

The plate sizes seem ok to me, nothing stands out as being "out-of-place".

[dewrad]

Thanks! I appreciate knowing I’m on the right track. I’ll continue tinkering with the model to see what I can come up with.

[Jean-Abdel]

But are these plates or landmasses ? Just as a reminder, there's no such thing as continental and oceanic plates, only continental and oceanic crust which most plates have both of. If these are the plates, they should cover the entire planet, so no big grey thing in between. If they're the landmasses, it looks great but just make sure not to mix up continents and plates.