Prehistoric Europe tilted

[Olvyr]

Insipired by a Facebook post about using a coastal map of Ice Age Europe (with lower sea levels and Doggerland located in the North Sea) I decided to come up with what might (after lots and lots more work) end up as my homebrew campaign setting.
As a twist, I turned the map 90° CCW.

For starters I just traced the outlines and lightly marked mountainous ranges.

What do you think, does it look realistic? Does it have potential? Because while settings like Faerun are great, I'm starting to really have a problem with maps which are geographically (or geologically) implausible. I suppose you all know what I mean.

Anyway, here's the first couple of pictures so you get the idea.

(Also, I'll probably go all hand-drawn, as I'm never quite satisfied with what I come up with on the PC)



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[Theseus]

sweet nice job

[Olvyr]

sweet nice job

Thanks!

As I said in my original post, I want to try to make most of the work by hand. But I'm wondering how I should draw the mountain ranges, considering the scale of the map. I'm afraid drawing individual peaks/ranges (think classic Middle-Earth map) might give a false sense of scale.

Can anyone point me to good examples of hand-drawn mountains at that scale? What I ultimately want to do is scan the drawing, and just colorize it in PS, luke it was done with watercolours on parchment or something.

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[Caenwyr]

Thanks!

As I said in my original post, I want to try to make most of the work by hand. But I'm wondering how I should draw the mountain ranges, considering the scale of the map. I'm afraid drawing individual peaks/ranges (think classic Middle-Earth map) might give a false sense of scale.

Can anyone point me to good examples of hand-drawn mountains at that scale? What I ultimately want to do is scan the drawing, and just colorize it in PS, luke it was done with watercolours on parchment or something.

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Why don't you try and draw mountain ranges instead of individual mountains, as in this glorious example? Definitely check out that website, they even provide a full tutorial!

[Olvyr]

Why don't you try and draw mountain ranges instead of individual mountains, as in this glorious example? Definitely check out that website, they even provide a full tutorial!

Thanks. Yeah I've that site bookmarked. There's another example/tutorial about zooming out further and drawing ridges just as wavy lines, which I might try.
I understand most mountain ranges gorm as ridges because of tectonics. Are there any non-ridged/isolated mountainous regions?

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[Caenwyr]

Thanks. Yeah I've that site bookmarked. There's another example/tutorial about zooming out further and drawing ridges just as wavy lines, which I might try.
I understand most mountain ranges form as ridges because of tectonics. Are there any non-ridged/isolated mountainous regions?

Orogenesis - mountain formation - usually happens when two tectonic plates smash together and one (or both) gets crumpled and pushed up. But there are mountains that get formed due to hotspot volcanic activity, where a plume of hot magma rises up, sometimes through the middle of a tectonic plate.

When that happens with relatively thin oceanic plates, the result is an island volcano (and as the plate moves across the hotspot it can eventually lead to a string of islands such as Hawaii. Seriously, check it out on satellite view on Google Maps. The string even continues underwater where the older volcanoes have died out and eroded beneath the waves. In fact, that string keeps going all the way to the Siberian coast!).

When a mantel plume rises up beneath a much thicker continental coast, it has a harder time breaking through, and usually end up creating a huge underground magma chamber, which results in the dome shaped uplift of the surface above, sometimes over vast areas. Yellowstone is one such example. It has mountains all the way along its rim (which measures hundreds of miles), lots of volcanic activity, geysers, you name it. And once every 50.000 years or so it managed to actually break the surface and cause a massive eruption. These types of mountains don't form long parallel ridges.


Interestingly, hotspots beneath continental plates can also be the driving factor of a divergent boundary system, breaking the plate apart in an interesting pattern. Initially it creates three "cracks" radiating outward. One of the two will eventually go dormant, while the other two will keep widening. Usually you'll see them as a rift with an interesting 120° angle (roughly, of course). I believe the Red Sea - Gulf of Aden system is one good example. The hot spot must have been somewhere around current day Djibouti, and the third "crack" (the one that went dormant) must originally have been pointed roughly southwest. The other two arms kept widening until they eventually were submerged. Also interestingly, the same process is currently happening at the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula. One very wide arm is again the Red Sea, the other is the rift going NNW (it has the Dead Sea in it!). The third arm is the Gulf of Suez. No idea which one has gone (or will go?) dormant.

And finally, an example of this "three-crack-mechanism" that actually has something to do with your map: the European Cenozoic Rift System! It's a rift that began widening, and then suddenly stopped. So now Europe is left with a 300 km long, narrow depression that now has the Rhine flowing through it.

[Olvyr]

So how'd this look for hand-drawn mountains? Too big? Too small? This is just a quick try.

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