First attempt at a Planet (Name open to suggestions)

[ZechGeo]

Hello Everybody!

I have had a little bit of time on my hands since the lockdown so have tried my hand at using basic geological and geographical systems to try and replicate a Planet Earth like body. The idea of this project is to have a collated patchwork of typical locations from across the globe to create a single planet and "map" different landforms depending upon their location, geological features, climate, and topography, which can used as a single reference tool.

For example if somebody was looking to see how a upland river may differ in its appearance depending on the topography or climate, or even different times of the year, or visa versa like I want a waterfall how can I fit this into my continent without introducing a magical waterfall just because.

For me the geography is one of the largest influences on peoples lifestyles and relating to fantasy introduces many of the typical stereotypes of races.



The first thing that I have to undertake in this project is to firstly create a Planet (Open to suggestions for the name) and I have presented the steps I have gone through in the next few images. I have used a combination of G-Plates and Inkscape to draw this. I recognise the quality of the images is reduced, and i think this is because I have translated this to and from G-plates and inkscape multiple times altering from vector to raster and back again but again I hope the output products are sufficient to convey the ideas.



The first thing I did was, using G-Plates, to position a rough series of plates with one main adult-phase ocean in the centre and configure all plate vector motions relative to this one. I've found G-plates as a good software as you can easily jump between 3D, rectangular and cartographic projections to visualise the land.




The next step was draw my main continental masses along the lines of the plates, this gave me a better idea of how my planet was shaping up with regards to continental and oceanic crust and gave me a chance to reconfigure any boundaries which were unfeasible.




From the continental masses and the relative plate motions I marked on what my margins were going to be, blue for constructive (spreading ridges), orange for destructive (Oceanic-Continental subduction zones), red for collision (continental-continental margins), grey for net/strike slip/conservative margins (think san andreas/ northern anatolia), and finally yellow for everybody's favourite volcanic hotspots, island chains and seamounts. This also allowed me to finesse my margins and introduce islands along some of my destructive plate margins.




I decided to make a topography map to outline where my mountain belts would be related to my plate margins, it isn't too as detailed a scale as I would like but is sufficient to determine climate zones, wind patterns and global climates ( come to this later). This was all done on inkscape and comprised of making many many polygons overlying each other. I took a lot of inspiration from Artifexian for this as his methods are highly effective for the output desired. I have added one or two rivers, however this is not exhaustive and most representative of the process of creating and designing rivers.




Now I have my geology and continents laid out, next i looked towards climates and currents specifically wind and oceanic currents. Because I decided to introduce a proto-spreading ridge with a broken landmass cleaving off similar to what modelling indicates will happen at the east african rift valley. In the end I decided that simplest answer was the best policy.




Now everything is in place I am ready to start placing my climate zones. These are by far from any means perfect and need a lot of refining and porting from G-Plates and back again to make sure everything lines up. I used a minimised version of the Koppen-Geiger classification relating to my oceanic currents and wind directions. I'm sure some of you will notice I designed my climate zones before I added some of the refinements to my plate margins as some don't match up entirely.




I know this is a bit of a long thread for a work in progress but as i'm also learning the software I'd like to outline my methods as I go along and give people opportunities to interject with either questions or suggestions.