world map with earth like evolution

[Zavael]

Hi, after a while a returned to playing with gimp and maps. I read some tuts here on the Cartographers' Guild forum to refresh my skills and from somebody posts I came across an interesting earth evolution theory - Shock dynamics. While at some moments, it raised my eyebrows, the thoughts about continents and mountains forming were inspiring. I am now trying to make a map and borrowing some procedures from that.

This is what I started with. A proto land, drawn randomly with some lakes from smaller meteor collisions already set up.


Then I added the main meteor impact place (the ignition force to start the tectonics movement), decided how the proto land will break down and tried to guess the movement of its parts


After that I moved my continents, altered some coastlines a little, changed the lakes a little, tear apart some rapidly moving pieces and squeeze some other pieces so I ended up with this final layout.


How do you feel about the continents and islands? Does they look natural?
I don't have any polar cape land like Antarctica, can be that a problem from climate perspective?
I am not as precise student as some people here are because of time shortage (some of you guys are really crazy!!! ), but before I study a little wilbur and enter the terrain design, I wanted to get some feedback

[kacey]

Neat, I can't say much for how natural it is because plate tectonics confuses the hell out of me but I like the idea of starting with an impact to get things going.

[Hai-Etlik]

You REALLY need to do this sort of thing on a sphere. For instance, you seem to be treating translation and rotation as distinct things, but on the surface of a sphere, there is only rotation. If you aren't working in those terms, your results will be so wrong you might as well not have bothered. You might even convince yourself to do something that is just obviously wrong. Learning to to think of your world as a sphere and to use projections correctly will have a far greater impact on the believably of you maps than tectonics. It's also easier, and fundamentally you need it to even do tectonics anyway.

Searching for "shock dynamics" seems to bring up a lot of pseudoscience nonsense (Things like meteorite impacts led to the shape of the continents very quickly not continental drift very slowly therefore there is no evidence the Earth is older than 6000 years old therefore my imaginary sky friend is REAL!), but there also seems there may be some real science using the term that the pseudoscientists are trying to leach legitimacy off of. It doesn't look like it's anywhere near as simple as "one big impact sent all the continents moving away from one another." though so much as "many big impacts led to the crust starting the rift/subduction cycles going. If so it sounds like the subduction at fractures was as important, if not more important than the rifting. Which is not to say it's as simple as "all the continents move toward the impact" either. I'm far from being a geophysicist though. It looks to me like the effects of shock dynamics, if they are relevant, are not something that would be relevant to the simplified models of tectonics that would be useful for worldbuilding.

You are of course free to use the crazy pseudoscience "shock dynamics" although it doesn't seem like it would be as interesting as more drastic departures from reality like geocentrism or a flat word.

[Kalium]

Agreed with the above, but just dropping in re your note about polar land, there is no requirement for you to have any. You will have milder poles (note how our south pole is far colder than our north, that is largely due to it being on land) but it should not be a problem.