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Decide the directions the plates move. Do any go through the continent?
Working on tectonics for my world
Hello everyone.
After a long time, I go back to work with my map (this is a thread of the beginins https://www.cartographersguild.com/s...ad.php?t=32894).
I initially thought of a story, and that needed a place, so a map was born. Over time I wanted to give a bit of realism to the location of mountains, climates and others. I struggled and got frustrated because I didn't have enough knowledge to move forward on my own. So I turned to this forum and several guided me. But I have slightly changed the shape of the original continent and its relief, which causes changes in other aspects such as tectonics, climates and other things that I do not know how to control. So now I am back to work on this map and would appreciate your help.
This is an approximation of the continent. The big island of the northwest needs to polish the coast.
This would be your location in the world.
And this would be an approximation of plate tectonics. I left without drawing the area where my continent would be located because I don't know how to give it a tectonic explanation so that its relief is plausible.
I've seen Gplates tutorials on youtube and this forum but it's still confusing for me.
How do you advise me to go on from here? I accept any type of comment or suggestion. I thank you enormously.
I would suggest that if there's only the one continent, start there and worry about sub-sea plates later. I would also suggest that it's fairly uncommon for a land mass of that size to have a seam of mountains exactly down the center of the landmass. The map indicates that the area of interest spans about 40 degrees of latitude or roughly 4500km, or a bit bigger than Australia. The topography looks a lot more like New Zealand, though, a much smaller landmass. The shown topography suggests to me that you can invoke a previous orogeny along the main mountain mass and call them "dead" like the Urals or Appalachians (resulting in the plates fused together), followed by the smaller landmass pushing under the larger to raise that end of the mass. The scale is a little unexpected for that, though, especially given the size of the mountain features. Using a hot spot to do some of the uplift is possible, but those have a tendency to be smaller and to burn through the craton (see the Snake river plain in North America).
Hello again,
Thanks KaiAeon for your answer, before i decide the direction of the plates, i want to resolve the issues expressed below.
Waldronate, thank you for your answer too, i have a questions:
First, I want to ask you about the position of the main mountain range, do you recommend that it be located closer to the south coast? What would this imply in terms of climates? that the entire northern zone becomes drier?
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Second, when you refer to "dead mountains", do you mean the small eastern mountain range (1), the large central mountain range (2), or both? And if they are dead, what height would you recommend they have?
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Third, do you recommend that the entire large landmass (1) belong to a single tectonic plate, and the large island of the northwest (2) be a different plate?
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Fourth, this is a clarification. I imagine places for my story with a particular climate, that i like. For example, I want the north coast to be humid and temperate-cold (like northern france (cfb) or Maine (dfb)) and the northwestern island to be cold with permanent snow on its mountains (like Norway (Dfc or ET), how can the rest of the characteristics be modified so that these places stay the way I want?
Thank you very much!
Last edited by Facubaci; 04-02-2022 at 07:19 PM.
I recommend putting the outline on a similarly-scaled Earth map and see how things compare.
As to whether moving the mountain range would affect the local climate, it will depend in very large part on the local wind and ocean current patterns. A suitable set of patterns can ensure that the mountain position doesn't make a particularly large difference. One thing that you'll find is that enormous oceans result in much more violent storm patterns because storms can just keep gathering power until they hit land. Having a mountain range on the southern side might make things moister than they are now. Because those mountains are fairly far from any coast, they may or may not have a huge impact on rainfall patterns as they are. Again, I am not a climate expert.
I used the term "dead mountains", which is not quite correct. I was referring to the entirety of the mountain change on the continent (both 1 and 2, but mostly 2) and describing what happens when a large mountain range is pushed up in an area and then the plate cools, locking the plates in place and leaving the mountains to slowly erode away. On Earth, there are some good examples of this sort of pattern, including the Appalachians (and their other fragments in Europe and Africa) and the Ural mountains (look at those for inspiration on basic heights and local landform shapes). In both cases, there was a massive collision that uplifted huge mountains and then the uplift stopped, locking the plate boundary in place. How well that would play on a world with only a single rather small continental mass isn't something that I can say much about. A lack of continental masses can imply either a hot world with lots of smallish, fast-moving plates; a cool world with its last hurrah of plate collisions happening with everything else eroded down to just below sea level; or possibly a world that's had a recent deposit of a large amount of water (perhaps a large storm of small comets) that raised the sea level by a few hundred meters and drowned the other masses.
If the larger continent is the result of an older plate collision, then the range down the middle of it is more likely to be set of parallel folded mountains rather than a single block. The fusion would result in what is acting like a single plate at the moment, with the smaller mass to the upper left being a separate plate that subducting under and uplifting the main mass. You would expect to see some mountains parallel to the new collision/subduction zone, which you have on the smaller mass, but not the larger.
The nice thing about having a map serve a story is that the map is useful for keeping a sense of scale and for inspiration. Unless your story is one that is specifically about the tectonics of the map and how they play out over time (for example: the continents are sentient and the merging of the two older ones and how they deal with the impinging of the new continent is the point of your story), then it's unlikely that the tectonics will be more than a backdrop against which the rest of it plays out. Putting your desired map on an Earth map of similar scale and latitude can get you sufficient plausibility for most stories. How a single continent would work on a mostly-water world with minimal ice caps is something I can't answer. The Earth designer chickened out in the design phase by putting solid attachments for polar caps in place, so worlds without such anchorages are a matter of speculation (ocean currents might distribute heat poleward well enough to prevent things ever getting much colder than England, but without the need for a tiny and hot Gulf Stream).
Based on the positioning of the mountains, you might find good models along the west coasts of the Americas more easily than the old world. You're looking at something the size of Australia, so you might look at that area as well (think flipped upside-down and being a bit colder).
Also, I would expect there to be a lot of rivers as it stands due to likely increased precipitation from lack of other land masses. With higher mountains, you'll get even more snow catchment and more rivers.
