Paralyzing Plate Tectonics

[MysteryMan23]

I'm trying to create my very own conworld right now. The thing is though, I'm stuck on the plate tectonics. I have no idea what I should do exactly, at least to get what I want.

The basic story is, all the continents in my world were once one big supercontinent, just like Pangaea. The continent ran north-to-south. Later, the supercontinent split into two, like when Pangaea split into Laurasia and Gondwana. From there, the two supercontinents split into the continents of the conworld today.

One of these continents is equivalent to our world's Eurasia; it is the largest of the continents overall, and runs from west to east. The others, I'm not quite certain about yet; I know I don't want to completely rip off planet Earth, though. I do, however, want a scientifically-valid (or at least, plausible) set of plate tectonics to explain the break-up of my world's Pangaea equivalent. I also want to avoid overly distorting the continents in question, as this conworld is meant to be pretty much spherical.

So, this is pretty much what I want at this point, I just don't know how to go about it. Any ideas?

[brandrinn]

What?

[patiku]

It seems like he's saying that his conworld starts off looking like prehistoric Earth and the continents are now configured in a way that also resembles Earth. At first I thought that he wanted advice on how to keep the continents from looking too much like Earth, but now I'm not so sure.

[TheWeaver]

Don't know enough about plate tectonics to be confident about sharing personal opinion, but...
I had a couple bookmarks from awhile ago surrounding this subject, found through pain and suffering. Unfortunately just 1 directly deals with plate tectonics, but all of them sound like they might become useful.

The Plate Tectonics one:
http://www.planetseed.com/relatedarticl ... n-building
A great World-Building Cookbook (seriously, you have to take a peek at it):
http://jc.tech-galaxy.com/bricka/earthlike_planet.html
A useful site and article:
http://worldbuildingschool.com/how-to-w ... -currents/

If you're interested in a couple more like these, lemme know and I'll dig up the rest o' them.
Hope this helps!

[MysteryMan23]

Clearly, a master communicator, I am not. (Especially not at night.)

Honestly, I'd prefer little more than a vague resemblance to the real world in my worlds continents, at any given time. I may want my Pangaea-equivalent to run north-to-south like the real Pangaea, but other than that I'm okay with it looking a lot different. Likewise with my Eurasia-analogue, except that I want one end to be highly peninsular so that I can have a Europe-like area, and even then I'm okay with the peninsular area and the rest of the continent having only a vague resemblance.

What I don't want is a bunch of continents that could not have formed a plausible supercontinent, or a situation where the proposed plate tectonics of my world simply don't add up. Nor do I want my conworld to look almost exactly like Earth. Also, I don't want my continents to come out distorted when I make a globe, though I'm not quite certain how I want to go about preventing it.

I guess what I'm really trying to ask here is this: I want to create an ersatz Pangaea, then have it break up into two super continents and have those break into several smaller continents, the largest of which is an ersatz Eurasia. I also want to have a good idea where the plates are in the present day. Further, I want to do all of this without the distortions of doing my continents on a map. So, how exactly would I go about setting this up?

@TheWeaver - Yes, I'm certainly would like more bookmarks. Especially if they can help me resolve this dilemma.

[brandrinn]

I still don't understand the problem. You start with a super continent. Draw some divergent fissures on it in random places (a look at a tectonic map of Earth will give you an idea how many you need), and fast forward. The resulting convergent boundaries will yield coastal mountain ranges like the Pacific Rim. As for drawing on a map, it should be fine as long as you stay mindful of what happens at the poles and what direction everything is moving.

[TheWeaver]

Not too much else in my sea of bookmarks that deals with plate tectonics specifically...

There's http://worldbuildingschool.com/adding-t ... world-map/.
If you're really desperate, here's another, though I never watched it:
http://www.deborahteramischristian.com/ ... aps-video/
I honestly am not sure that the video has any science behind it.

[Radius Solis]

One tip: Earth's continental coastlines are only a mediocre fit to each other if you move them back to where they came from; South America only vaguely matches up to Africa, for example. But if, instead, you look at the edges of the continental shelves, the fit gets way better. The lesson to be learned is that it's not your coastlines that should fit into each other like jigsaw puzzle pieces, but rather the actual edges of the continental masses, which are submerged - and range from just offshore to hundreds of miles out to sea. Consult a map to see what I mean (the continents' true edges are where the light blue turns to dark blue).

[patiku]

If you want to take a shortcut, you can take a map of prehistoric Earth and modify it to suit your needs (i.e. add an island or a strait or whatever). Jurassic Earth, for example, has two continents with significant east-west axes. Delete Proto-Japan and fudge the South American coastline a little bit and you'd have an unrecognizable world!

[LeCiagoPanda]

Make sure to include mountains in the right places. Look up converging vs diverging vs transforming plates (I learned about plate tectonics in French so I'm not quite sure about the English terms) and all the geological formations they entail. This seems to be a decent link:
http://www.platetectonics.com/book/page_5.asp
and
http://geology.about.com/od/platetecton ... graphy.htm
It might do good to look up Alfred Wegener as well.

Thus, the words in the conlang would be partially dependent on the geological features near where they live. A plains people might not have a word for "mountain", and you might adopt the name of a specific river from the word for "river" in the language of a people supposedly living in the area around said river. Also pay heed to "hot spot" islands such as Hawaii to add to the detail. Glaciers and sea levels would also be something to pay attention to. A certain people might not be able to cross a land bridge (a la Bering) while a glacier is there, but could go to a new continent or area after a warm period. If your conlanging as well, that might affect when two particular languages come into contact, or it might lead to the isolation of a specific language.
Just my two cents.

[MysteryMan23]

@brandrinn: The problem is, I don't want to do this "blind', if you will. I already have some idea of what I want my ersatz Pangaea to break into, and I want to make sure it works out instead of failing geology forever. I'll admit, your advice is sound for those conworlders who really don't have such a plan, and it's one I'll keep in mind, but I'm not sure it'll work in my case.

Another problem is, I don't feel like I have an intuition for the kinds of distortions maps cause yet, or how to correct for them. And given what can happen when you don't take them into account or, better yet, dodge them altogether, I really don't feel like I can create a real map of my conworld; really, I feel like I can only do the shapes.

Still, I think I've got some ideas about how I want to move forward. I think perhaps I should work on some of the shapes I know I want, figure out where they are in my ersatz Pangaea, and go from there. Thanks for the advice, everyone. And thanks for being willing to question me, brandrinn. It helped me figure out what I really wanted to do.