WIP - Tectonic Plates & Continent Placement Advice Sought

[patamei]

Hello fellow cartographers,

I recently completed a map of a region of my world, Patamei, before realising it would behove me to at least sketch out the landmasses and activity of my world, so I can get a decent idea for topography and climate in a realistic way. I've come up with the below and applied the following logic:

• Continental plates have dots, ocean plates no dots
• Arrows indicate fault direction
• The planet is Earth-like and similarly sized and composed for tectonic activity

Very grateful for expert eyes or suggestions. I want to avoid anything that breaks out of verisimilitude too far, but also avoid the classic Earth clone issue (or as well as one can when creating an Earth-like world in most other respects).

[smiler127]

Very cool! I hadn't considered the impact of tectonics when designing my own setting. I think I will have to try something like this too! This picture looks great and you can already imagine how the mountains will look as you move forward!

[MrBragg]

Welcome to the world of tectonics! The first question you should ask yourself is how rigorously correct are you looking for your tectonics to be? There's no right or wrong answer to that question; tectonics can quickly become a seemingly endless rabbit hole and eat up weeks and months if you choose to dive deep. In any case, if you're interested in tectonics at almost any level you might want to check out Charerg's excellent gplates tutorial.


Now, with that out of the way, after a quick superficial glance there are a few things you might consider revising. You have a few plates that seem to be moving in impossible ways--the northwest oceanic plate has two edges moving inward toward each other, the big oceanic plate in the east has an eastward arrow in between two westward ones, etc. Using gplates is a great way of seeing these types of conflicts, so I'd definitely encourage you to check out that program if you're interested in pursuing this.

[patamei]

If I'm honest, it's mostly a vessel to get the continents and landmasses in place. So I do want it to be as accurate as possible, but I have a lot of stuff I'd rather focus on than just tectonics and animating their movements etc. I'll definitely sense check the directions, and thank you for the recommendation

To that end, the linked tutorials suggest drawing continents first, then once one figures out their general size, topography, and drift, they can reverse engineer the plates. Is that a simpler way than starting from the mantle and heading up?

[MrBragg]

To that end, the linked tutorials suggest drawing continents first, then once one figures out their general size, topography, and drift, they can reverse engineer the plates. Is that a simpler way than starting from the mantle and heading up?

I did a process similar to this--starting with a rough idea of continent shapes and positions, reverse engineering them into a supercontinent, then working out a general idea of not-grossly-impossible tectonics from there. My goal was only to come up with something generally plausible and it still took quite a while and resulted in quite a few modifications to the initial shapes / positions, so that procedure might be more than you want to get into.

Tbh, if your main goal is just to get topography in sensible locations, I don't know that you necessarily need to worry about explicitly depicting the tectonics for your project. Tectonics follow some general rules--summarized pretty nicely here--so I think as long as where you place continents / seas / mountains are generally consistent with those guidelines, that might be good enough.

[patamei]

that might be good enough.

I think that's exactly what I'm gonna go for. I may one day go back and really try to suss it out, but until then having it be pretty much right is fine with me