Help with tectonics

[Laime]

Wow, thanks for your all help guys ^_^ I don't think I had that much positive reinforcement on my projects in my life You're great.

I'm currently working on refining the coastlines (they look blurry and splotchy on my original map so I'm redrawing them o_O) and trying to draw islands in place of markers, but I've looked over the forums and (unsurprisingly) found a lot of cool articles and tutorials here. I'm going through them but since I'm not that good at science in my native language, you can imagine how slow it is in Enlish... @_@

What I've done with the map I'm posting now:

1. 6 and 9 are now colliding, as are 15 and 11! Yay for London drivers smashing into each other head on! (thank you for that image, altasilvapuer )
2. 7 is moving in another direction, which I guess means islands on the collision site (thus brown triangles abound). I also changed the boundaries a bit since I wanted the islands closer to the continent.
3. Islands added: 9&10, 2&17, 16&15, 13&15
4. I hid the mountains for now since there were too many things on the map already
5. I tried to do the whole "shade plate boundaries with according to what plates do what to each other" thing altasilvapuer suggested, but only gone so far before going completely stumped o_O My problem is, I can't quite figure out some of the plates since they move under an angle that doesn't make it absolutely clear whether they, say, collide or slide near each other. For example, plate 1 slams into plate 6, but plate 6 slides past plate 1. How do you handle that? I marked the borders with mixed colors, but how does this tectonic confusion affect the above-groundy stuff? Do these borders behave like one type or the other? Is it the matter of simply what plate moves faster?

thebax2k, with the 16th plate I figured it's moving away from the 9th and and sort of away from the 14th, so I thought the ocean would be very deep there, with no islands. Am I missing something?

Karro, I haven't yet even thought about projection... I'll add more ocean to the sides to make it less square when I start coloring. It's just that it's a very big file already (the images you see are 7 percent of the size) and I didn't want to make it even bigger. As for distortion, I pasted the map onto Google Earth and it looked alright for me. Maybe that's because continents are not that close to the edge of the document. Anyway, the world is fantasy and I think I'll be going for a stylized look, so distortion won't be that much of a concern. I guess this is the place where my desire for realism gives way to my control impulses (distort something I've made? O_O make it all weird-looking and unintelligible? Oh noes! Never!)

Thank you again for all your help

[Karro]

Wow, thanks for your all help guys ^_^ I don't think I had that much positive reinforcement on my projects in my life You're great.

I'm currently working on refining the coastlines (they look blurry and splotchy on my original map so I'm redrawing them o_O) and trying to draw islands in place of markers, but I've looked over the forums and (unsurprisingly) found a lot of cool articles and tutorials here. I'm going through them but since I'm not that good at science in my native language, you can imagine how slow it is in Enlish... @_@

What I've done with the map I'm posting now:

1. 6 and 9 are now colliding, as are 15 and 11! Yay for London drivers smashing into each other head on! (thank you for that image, altasilvapuer )
2. 7 is moving in another direction, which I guess means islands on the collision site (thus brown triangles abound). I also changed the boundaries a bit since I wanted the islands closer to the continent.
3. Islands added: 9&10, 2&17, 16&15, 13&15
4. I hid the mountains for now since there were too many things on the map already
5. I tried to do the whole "shade plate boundaries with according to what plates do what to each other" thing altasilvapuer suggested, but only gone so far before going completely stumped o_O My problem is, I can't quite figure out some of the plates since they move under an angle that doesn't make it absolutely clear whether they, say, collide or slide near each other. For example, plate 1 slams into plate 6, but plate 6 slides past plate 1. How do you handle that? I marked the borders with mixed colors, but how does this tectonic confusion affect the above-groundy stuff? Do these borders behave like one type or the other? Is it the matter of simply what plate moves faster?

thebax2k, with the 16th plate I figured it's moving away from the 9th and and sort of away from the 14th, so I thought the ocean would be very deep there, with no islands. Am I missing something?

Karro, I haven't yet even thought about projection... I'll add more ocean to the sides to make it less square when I start coloring. It's just that it's a very big file already (the images you see are 7 percent of the size) and I didn't want to make it even bigger. As for distortion, I pasted the map onto Google Earth and it looked alright for me. Maybe that's because continents are not that close to the edge of the document. Anyway, the world is fantasy and I think I'll be going for a stylized look, so distortion won't be that much of a concern. I guess this is the place where my desire for realism gives way to my control impulses (distort something I've made? O_O make it all weird-looking and unintelligible? Oh noes! Never!)

Thank you again for all your help

Well, no worries about any weaknesses in English: A good map is a language all its own.

So, at your boundaries where one plate is slamming into another, but that plate is moving laterally, like the 1/6 boundary, you're going to get a mix of effects. Since 1 is smashing against 6, you'll probably get a convergent boundary effect - meaning that one or the other is probably slipping under the other and creating an island chain. At the same time, the transformative side of the boundary is going to mean this is an active earthquake zone.

At the same time, this could be an example of what I was talking about with different plates affecting the movement of each other. 6 isn't moving toward 1, but 1 is pushing up against 6. Given the current direction of 6's movement, and a basic understanding of what would happen if these were objects floating on water, and you'd start to see the pressures exerted on 6 would cause the bottom half to continue swinging rightward, while the top half may start to push up toward the the top or left, squeezing against that divergent boundary. at the end of the day, we might see a roughly counterclockwise turn being effected on plate 6, overall.

You're also right that with 9 and 16 being divergent boundaries, we'd expect to see a deep trench along that line, and not islands at all.

Projection might not be a prominent concern, but for me it was kind of a head-smacker later when I realized that I hadn't planned for that, and once pasted onto Google earth I got a lot of distortion on my northern continents. You're right that yours aren't too near the poles, so it may be less of a problem. I also notice that, compared to earth, your world is a little heavy on the ocean-cover and a little light on the land. This will likely have effects on the overall climate of your planet (with smaller landmasses, comparatively, you'll have better moisture distribution and fewer deserts, most likely).