Alright, I've been trying to read up a bit on tectonics and figured the best way to see if I'm actually learning anything would be to try something and see how messed up you all think my model looks. At this point I'm at the point where I'm breaking up a few continents and wanted to solicit some feedback on what I'm doing and whether my underlying rationale makes sense; the boundaries between fragments are still a work in progress and subject to change, so try to ignore places where they don't fit together well. Here is an overview of the continent movements so far:

tectonics.gif

Starting at 225 Ma (years are basically arbitrary; I picked the start date to give reasonable velocities between the start and end points), I have the supercontinent begin to break apart. I have a triple junction develop at the red star that results in the green fragment cleaving off the orange/purple/teal fragment. The third leg of the junction fails, but will later become active when orange breaks off from purple.

triple225.png

After the rift, nothing really happens for a while while the two chunks drift apart. In my current model I simply have the two fragments drifting apart and generating oceanic crust at essentially a constant rate--age is shaded in 25 Ma intervals--which, to my super untrained eye, looks ok, though opinions on this would be appreciated.

100MaCrust.png

Where I become much less sure is at 100 Ma where I have a bunch of things happening at the same time. First, I have a new triple junction develop between the green / red / blue pieces that eventually causes the green to cleave off and change direction to now gyrate off to the southwest. The snapshot of oceanic crust age on the right is at 20 Ma. I'm unsure if 1) green abruptly changing its direction of movement is plausible, or 2) if the hinging movement between green and blue makes a lot of sense (the flowlines look better to me than the animation does).

triple100.png20 MaCrust.png

At the same time, I also have orange break free from purple and begin heading northwest. The speed of this movement is pretty high, so presumably it's being subducted by something (green's plate??), but I'm unsure about what the driving force could be to get orange moving and what the interaction would be between the moving orange plate the the ridge created between green and purple.

So yeah, looking for any input anyone is willing to provide, even if that input is that I'm going about this in entirely the wrong way. Thanks in advance!