Collaborative Realistic Worldbuilding, Part ?
- Thread starter Lothal
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Normally I would agree with you, but with the warm current in the ocean to the east and the smaller mid temperature current on the southern coast of the small north eastern continent, I think it actually makes sense for the way Nathan drew it. Plus the sea to the south is almost directly on the equator and funnels up into this sea; I imagine this southern sea is quite warm and that warm current feeds directly into the current system you are asking about, and it follows the coast and actually may be the cause of the anti-clockwise current.
The thing about that equatorial sea is that it's otherwise cut off from the ocean. It's not going to export warm water without importing water from somewhere (and the volumes of water circulated by major ocean currents are much bigger than those transported by rivers, so rainfall isn't it). I don't know of anywhere on Earth where a basin's natural curl is reversed simply in order to make its stream parallel to a neighboring gyre's, and even if that effect does come into play here the circulation in the northern strait would be more vulnerable to synchronization with the sea we're discussing than the other way around, due to scale.
I figured we could reorient those island chains to be coherent with everything else if necessary.
Hotspots.
I feel as though more islands should be added to the “pacific” ocean part of our map
Because i cant really work on the map I’m going to through a bunch of advice:
HOTSPOTS: hotspots are areas where magma swells from the mantle and spews out without a subduction zone ie Hawaii and Etna and many random islands.
Subduction zone:
A subduction zone is an area where plate is eaten by the mantle and subducted. Irl the best example is the Ring of Fire around the pacific, the phillipines, Indonesia, etc. mountains and volcanoes follow.
Rifts: a rift is an area where land is expanding from the mantle. The best example is the East African Rift Valley, New Zealand, and Iceland.
HOTSPOTS: hotspots are areas where magma swells from the mantle and spews out without a subduction zone ie Hawaii and Etna and many random islands.
Subduction zone:
A subduction zone is an area where plate is eaten by the mantle and subducted. Irl the best example is the Ring of Fire around the pacific, the phillipines, Indonesia, etc. mountains and volcanoes follow.
Rifts: a rift is an area where land is expanding from the mantle. The best example is the East African Rift Valley, New Zealand, and Iceland.
Based off of Codea's ideas for the tectonic plates.
As I had time today at lunch to do something other than paperwork.
Arrows are the general trend of movement of each plate. So as Codea said, don't read anything into the arrows.
General ideas:
Plates C & K closed off the eastern portion of a sea (salt lakes there now). Western portion of the sea will be gone in a few million years.
Plate M in the fastest moving plate influencing the hand formation in plate F. It is also helping form the islands in Plate G.
Plate G is buckling, forming numerous islands, as it slides under Plate H.
Plate I is sliding under Plate J
Plate N and Plate H are slowly closing off the equatorial sea.
Plate P is slowly moving under Plate B.
Plates B, C, D, and E are hampering Plate A overall movement southward.
Looking at it now, I probably had made Plates C and F into one plate.
Plate O is rotating around the pole.
Last edited:
ST15RM
Banned
btw i added a few things on the coasts.
i’ll complete a rough draft of elevation today
If plate B is moving east then the hotspot island chains should match it, with the bigger/newer islands in the west and getting smaller/older as you go east.
It might make more sense to break that portion of Plate B off and make it part of Plate L in this case.
I'm not 100% but I'm pretty sure if the northern plate is going south on one side, it would have to be moving north on the other, due to how a globe works.
I prefer convergence to divergence in the east. The L-shaped continent looks more like the result of uplift along the edge of a plate than a fragment of a supercontinent.
Didn't participate in the creation of the continents, but thought I would have my own go at making the plate tectonics, in case it is of any help. I have to say, plates are hard, because in reality their direction is subtly rotational as well as against or toward one another. My drawing might make no sense but you can take ideas from it if something looks like it works.
Thank you. It was a quick job and it's kind of hard to go off coastlines alone, you have to use your own imagination to think where the mountains may be, as well as the ocean trenches.