WIP: the world of Genovre

[Blindkingofbohemia]

The goal of this project was to develop a reasonably plausible global map for the world where future novels will be set—specifically, in a city that I'm currently calling Genovre.

I probably don't actually need the entire globe mapped. The intent is to work everything out at the global scale and then take and "zoom in on" sections of map that are relevant.

I am working to combine a reasonable level of tectonic plausibility, wind/air/precipitation accuracy and temperature determination to produce a world that—hopefully—passes muster even to fairly critical eyes.

Without further ado, I present the work-in-progress that is my evolving map of the world where Genovre is set.

Tectonics
I began by producing a sketch-history of the world's tectonic evolution. The series begins approximately 2 billion years into the planet's history. [I don't know how to make those fancy tectonic-plate-movement gifs, but I'd love to find out. If anyone knows, please do share!]

1600px-41.8myo_blu.png
2 billion years old.

292myo_blu.png
Approx 2.3 billion years old; plates have converged in a supercontinent, Donostia.

507myo_blu.png
2.5 billion years: Donostia is breaking down as the plates diverge again. What will come to be the Bakriqu and Sunharrow Seas is opening up.

1.32byo_blu.png
3.3 billion years: Donostia is a distant memory. Plates are converging once again toward forming a supercontinent, Ghazilia.

1.43byo_blu.png
3.5 billion years: Ghazilia is a tentacled monster stretching over the North Pole. A huge shallow inland ocean has formed that will later become the Lesser and Sunharrow Seas.

1.56byo_blu.png
3.6 billion years: the tentacled monster is further converging into a lump. Island-continents in the east and south are making their own ways across the oceans.

2.5byo.png
4ish billion years: the supercontinent is just beginning to break down along a rift in the north and west, the ancient Ghazilian Ocean that is now known as the Lesser Sea and (further out) the Sunharrow Sea. The island continents have found their own places, impacting other plates and forcing up sharp mountain ranges.

1600px-Platelayout.png
This is the layout of tectonic plates in the 4 billion years old map. Since it is the final map, it's the only one I produced to look nice—I have the others but they are very ugly.

Note: there are some inconsistencies in form and size of landmasses, I know. The final map is the final map, and so it took most of my attention. My only concern with the earlier maps is that the tectonic evolution is reasonably plausible. Thoughts are very welcome.

Orogenies
As well as the layout of the continents themselves, I know that tectonics people are really into understanding where mountain ranges have formed and when. In an effort to get this right I tracked the impacts between plates and resulting formations of mountain chains (orogenies) in each step, giving me a history of older and newer orogenic formations across the world.

Orogenies.png
This is my sketchy schematic map produced by tracking impacts and roughly sketching orogenic formations, then tracking the movement of the continental crust underneath them to work out where they'd end up. Each line represents the "spine" of a chain of mountains, colour coded by age.

From oldest to newest (each step is matched to a tectonic map above):

1. Light tan
2. Mud brown
3. Pink
4. Purpley-Blue
5. Teal

Using this schematic map of orogenies over the ages, I put together a rough "heightmap" capturing both above- and under-water mountain chains as well as oceanic rifts formed by seafloor spreading or subduction.

heightmap.png
This needs a lot of refinement to get it from sketchy-stage to proper-map stage, but hopefully you can see the broad brushstrokes of what I was trying to do: very ancient mountain ranges are worn down and low (but still exist), like the Appalachians or Scottish Highlands. Newer mountain ranges are very high, like the Andes and Himalayas. You will also notice continental shelves (formed and moved around by the tectonic processes mentioned above) and that mountain ranges extend into the ocean.

Climate
This part was a huge learning curve for me, so I imagine there will be mistakes. It remains a work in progress. However, having put in the work to track tectonic developments for billions of years I thought this world deserved to get the most accurate climate I can give it.

Winds and currents
First, I completed a map of oceanic currents and then winds for the northern summer and winter, according to a tutorial I found right on this site.

Currents.png
Ocean currents gave me a lot of trouble. For some reason my world's layout just didn't seem amenable to tidily-closed loops. I think I got (most of the way) there in the end, though. Then it was on to prevailing winds

Jan Winds.png
For the northern winter. You'll note that the inter-tropical convergence zone tends a long way north. This is because (I read) the ITCZ leans heavily toward the hemisphere with the most landmass, which is definitely my northern hemisphere. I was probably a bit too cautious adding prevailing winds around my pressure centres... but I think overall it worked out okay.

Jul Winds.png
Here's the northern summer. I was a little less cautious placing winds here, but ultimately it doesn't matter a great deal anyway: when you're building a world around a supercontinent, most of the map is just open ocean. It doesn't seem to matter too much (except for later history...) where the prevailing winds blow over the ocean.

Rainfall
Then it was on to precipitation. Where gets water, and how much? I am working on an iPad, which is strictly limited in the number of layers it can create and lacks all kinds of selection tools, so this took forever.

JanRain.png
Rain patterns in the northern winter. I imagine this is fairly self explanatory, but if not: revealed areas of map don't get any especially high rainfall. They are "dry". The shades of purple represent incrementally higher levels of rainfall: low, moderate, high, very high.

JulRain.png
And the northern summer. The final step in the tutorial is "you might want to clean this up a bit to look nice". On an iPad, with my finger? No way. Sorry about that.

Temperature
This part was really interesting, but I had to do it twice because I messed up the way that various influences on temperature layer on top of each other. If you read this, oh writer of that wonderful tutorial, I suggest you go over that part of the tutorial again. It's not quite as easy to follow as the rest.

JanTemp.png
Northern winter. The unnaturally straight lines are over the ocean where (I figured) it doesn't matter so much.

JulTemp.png
Northern summer. You might notice that there's a bit of weirdness around the south-eastern continental cluster, Sanibar. Because of its layout against the equator its affected by a number of warm currents that should push the temperature up pretty high... I'm not sure exactly how all that fits together but I did my best. Feedback welcome.

Biomes
And the upshot is... this map, based on the biome-colours here.

ClimateLayer.png
There are black gaps, I know. I am working them out!

And once I recolour the schematic colours to look naturalistic, we have this:

ClimateColours.png

Next steps are to finish the layout of climates, then work on a (much) more naturalistic map using climate/biome colours. At some point I'll need to work out where rivers fall, and then where population centres are likely to develop so that I can get to work on politics.

[Skalimoi]

Very nice progress so far. I can't wait to know about the politics of this planet