AERLAAN – A playground built for a muse

[PaGaN]

Hi Yasha!

First things first: Welcome to the Guild! you couldn't have chosen a more friendly and helpful collection of cartography enthusiasts, hobbyists and professionals to spend your time with. Any questions you have or help you need are only an ask away.

So, whilst i'm a gazillion miles from developing the cultural maps of Aerlaan i would be lying if i said i didn't have a rough idea of who lives there When i'm done mapping (or done "enough") i'll illustrate a character concept for the races for y'all to see.

But essentially the world is home to 4 distinct races with only 3 of those being indigenous.

There are the Urshaani who stand about 8' and look human for the most part but with some notable differences (and NO, NOT pointy ears). Then there are the Tao-Rindor, an imposing muscular reptilian race who are gung-ho crazy on an unwavering obedience their laws to the point that ALL crime is punishable by death (with the severity of the crime determining whether or not it is just the perpetrator that dies or whether family gets executed too or, in the case of treason, EVERYONE that has ever had a relationship of any kind with the guilty party). They are a tough people to get along with. Next we have the Salanna who are somewaht harder to classify as they are, at least partially, plant based and not necersarily physical all of the time, also, asexual or hemaphrodite and, well, no-one really knows HOW to classify them. They kind of keep to themselves but seem gentle and have never had a war that anyone can ever recall.

lastly there are the good old homo sapiens of Aerlaan, commonly referred to as apes by the Urshaani and Lawless Scum by the Tao-Rindor. The Salanna just smile politely and move on.

A detail that has been lost to EVERYONE on Aerlaan is that there was a 5th race in ancient antiquity that is now lost to memory but it is this 5th race that actually created the Tao-Rindor, Salanna and Humans for purposes that are now lost (or so it seems).

This ancient race have not walked on the face of Aerlaan for hundreds of thousands of years but that doesn't mean they don't exist anymore. You asked about the Moons of Shom? Yeah, you might be able to find them there...

CAVEAT: all of the above (like everything else with the building of this world) could (and likely WILL) change as i work through it.

If you want an example of a guildmember who has WAY more development of their world then you should take a read of Pixie's Thread here. VERY INSPIRING!

anyway, that's enough for now and again, WELCOME!

PaGaN

[Yasha Oqlie]

Thank you for the warm welcome. This is indeed why I joined the guild after years of lurking

The races you've got sound very original, and the mystery behind their creation adds a lot of flavor to the world. I love the idea of plant-based sentient life.

Again, thank you for the warm welcome. I'm hoping to learn much more from all the awesome members of the guild.

[PaGaN]

NO, i'm not dead! LOL

BUT!, i DID have to go back to square one as i realised that Aerlaan 2.0 (first attempt with GPlates) was impossible when it came to me trying to logically reconstruct what had happened tectonically to get to where the landmasses were. Whilst i like the configuration of Aerlaan 2.0 i just couldn't make it "work".

SO...in the past weeks I have consumed a small countries allotment of wine as a self-prescribed anti-psychotic as I dove BACK into GPlates to start over...FROM SCRATCH. the difference this time was that i was:

1) creating polylines for the oceanic rifts to "appear" for 10ma intervals and then,
2) cloning the rifts for each 10ma plate rotation,
3) changing the cloned rifts ages accordingly so that they appear for the next 10ma rotation,
4) appropriately transforming the geometry of the rifts to accomodate the plate movements,
5) transformed the geometry of the plates themselves by the same cloning methos when collisions occurred.

i really, REALLY, REEEEAAAAAALLLLLLY don't recommend this to ANYONE. EVER!!!! It was a king size Pain In The A***

However, that being said, i now have something that i am confident with regarding what the hell has happened...MOSTLY! This is where you guys come in. The following is still WIP but I need help figuring out how to mark down what is going on in a couple of areas.

NOTE: The "landmasses" are the outlines for the continental shelves NOT the land. The passive margins will be quite a bit "inland" from the edge of the shelves (wind, rain and sedimentation/erosion mechanics permitting) and the northern and southern landmasses will be much like Canada's gorgeous beautiful and glacier carved northern territories.

Aerlaan Nov 2017.jpg

So, the two green boxes are what i'm having trouble with.

1) LEFT BOX: These two masses rifted about 20ma or so....fine. Logically the spreading centre is creating new ocean floor that is subducting the older, denser oceanic crust to the east and west and creating island arcs on both sides.

Question 1: how do you represent what happens when the ridge reaches the old crust? does the ridge continue splitting, spewing new crust, keep growing and subducting the older oceanic crusts and making the island arc bigger as the plates seperate or are the east/west margins of the ridge contained by transform boundaries (like the rift in the scotai plate on earth). that would look odd as the new crust would be a subduction zone and not just a transform zone.

Question 2: The southern landmass has a mostly passive margin except for the converging boundary inland. This new rift zone has a weird subduction boundary that creeps down and encroaches into the passive margin. i don't know how to resolve that. ANYTHING that would encroach onto the passive boundary would be wrong. for it to "be right" would state that the plate boundary is at the spreading centre of the ridge but then what about the subduction of the oceanic crust to the west?

2) CENTRAL BOX:

This ridge system was created by the rifting of the northen and southern landmasses a whilst ago. the ridge created seafloor spreading that is subducting the MUCH MUCH MUCH older oceanic crust west of it. Again, same issue: how do you represent the leading edge of the ridge? I would imagine that such a scenario could create a landmass/island something like Iceland right over the ridge. I know that logically ridges MUST open up encrouch upon and subduct older crust at some point but currently all the ridges on earth terminate into continental plate boundaries.

anyway, I hope these questions make sense and someone here can stop me from developing an intracranial bleed as i continuously try and visualise what should be happening.

PaGaN

[Falconius]

Wow, intense. Uh... I got nothing, this is already way beyond me.

[PaGaN]

Hey Falconius
Intense, yes, a very good word to describe the past month...lol.
I'm close, VERY close, to being able to move on. It's just these two areas ineed to make peace with, then I can do coastlines, height map, atmospherics, winds, oceans and precipitation and finally, the holy Grail... Climates! LMAO

what the hell did I sign myself up for? Thank the gods I'm half Welsh and inherited my mother's stubbornness

I'm thinking Pixie will probably chime in at some point with some storm giant sized nuggets of tectonic wisdom.

[kacey]

Wow, hopefully you don't get too much post traumatic stress from this, I was wondering where you'd gone. Glad to see you're still working on this and I can't wait to see the actual land masses.

[PaGaN]

Hey Kacey!

Yep, still here... LOL.

Re: PTSD, I think my brain is now one gaping rift system

Once I've moved beyond these couple of sticking points I will be able to do the coasts (thanks to your pointers )

Anyway, how are YOU getting on?

[bandersnatch]

This thread is awesome, you're going deep.
How did u make the illustrations of the planets and moons?
Keep it up, looking forward to the rest!

[Pixie]

I'm thinking Pixie will probably chime in at some point with some storm giant sized nuggets of tectonic wisdom.

(I'm here... but not sure about those nuggets. )

So, what I think about the left box: i did a drawing, to my eyes the two divergent boundaries will link. That subduction gradually turns into a strike-slip fault, since the plates aren't really converging, but rather moving along.
leftbox.png

As for the center box: I think you would have that old oceanic crust opening temporary spreading centers. When you get subduction on two opposite sides of a plate, it gets pulled in both direction, basically tearing it apart. Now, you can open those spreading centers anywhere on the oceanic plate, or consider that close to one of the boundaries there are weak points. If this was the case, then the subduction stops and a strip of continental plate gets pulled all the way to the other boundary, effectively opening a new spreading ridge. I didn't do a drawing for this. You could have the continent to the west of that inland sea with a just-starting-rift.

[PaGaN]

This thread is awesome, you're going deep.
How did u make the illustrations of the planets and moons?
Keep it up, looking forward to the rest!

Hey Bandersnatch (great name by the way!)

Welcome to the guild and thank you for the compliments

Re: the planet and moon images, the surfaces were painted on equirectangular canvases and then wrapped around a sphere 3D mesh in photoshop. Then rasterised the spheres when i was happy with them. Then took the layers into the main image and composited them. NOTE: nothing about Aerlaan's system is written in stone at the moment (given that i'm now working on Aerlaan version 3.0) I will probably go back and do full 3D renders of the system using Blender. THere are some really great planet rendering tutorials out there. But that will not be for a VERY long time...LMAO. I still have a metric crap ton of work to do on Aerlaan before i can even get to the point where i'm working on the actual map itself.

PaGaN