While I really enjoyed the gplates series for its value, I'm super excited to move onto spec bio. I'm appalled that that mid ocean ridge didn't turn into laramide orogeny, simply APPALLED.
Yesterday I decided to ignore flowlines and ocean crust in my simulation, and so far I'm not regretting it. It gets rid of at least half the work and makes the process much more enjoyable. What annoyed me the most was redoing all the flowlines and ocean crusts basically at every timestamp. Yes, there is some stuff that I'm not going to be able to simulate, but it's good enough for my purposes. I'm much more likely to actually finish my simulation after making that decision.
You don't really need the flowlines. They're helpful but recreating them is a nuisance. What I do is set my divergent boundaries to half stage rotation so they're always in the middle of the two plates, and then duplicate the line feature to draw isochrons as a hint towards ocean crust age. Although I haven't figured it out yet, with pyGPlates you can automate some of this to create seafloor age grids.
I *literally* did the absolutely identical thing. In the work of around 3 weeks, I nearly got to 750m.y point in my 1000m.y simulation, and I stuck in how complicated simulation became and just abandoned it, but I finished new simulation in around 2 weeks just getting rid of ocean crust and flowlines.
@@zoqaeski How do you set the divergent boundaries (rifts) to half stage rotation? If they're meant to stay in between two plates it needs to be tied to both plate IDs no? And how does it remain in the middle of two plates if they move in various directions including rotating?
Keep in mind they will be significantly reduced through erosional events over time. The Black Hills, Appalachians, and the St Francois Mtns from my home state of MO are examples of old mountain ranges. Granted, those are all examples dating over 1 billion years old.
@@johng.7608 oh, and to append to my other comment, the mountain ranges may be old, but they are mostly still active, meaning they will likely maintain their height somewhat.
Its probably worth noting that when you get to more modern times or accounting for paleoclimates there is another kind of mountains associated with active uplift primarily from magmatic upwelling of rifting. In this case you get Grabens and Horsts which are depressed and raised sections of crust respectively which occur when crust is pulled apart. These Horsts are often known referred to as block fault mountains and are characteristic of rift zones and other extensional environments. This overlaps with Laramide of the mid ocean ridge subduction type somewhat as the zone of upwelling can persist as is occurring beneath the Colorado plateau a section of the North American Craton which is being heated and pushed up from below causing it to rift away and melt from below dripping into the mantle(mantle drip volcanism is a thing which can result in several volcanoes getting fed magma at once in an episodic event). This probably isn't really accounted for in popular plate tectonics models as it's very complicated and not fully understood either but it appears that in the case of major fast spreading mid ocean ridges they can indeed persist at least over 50 million years after subducting and causing major extensional block fault mountain building this seems to be because unlike how we have conventionally assumed the major oceanic plates aren't limited to the crust but extend down into the mantle to at least the Mantle Transition Zone(MTZ). There are also transform boundaries which while they can just slide past each other they can also build mountains since they aren't always purely transform. Lots of faults are a mix of transform and either compression or extension you can even have a fault which is compressional on one end and extensional on the other due to relative rotation of the two plates sliding past each other. Yes even subduction zones can have a transverse motion Cascadia is one such example due to the relative difference in direction of motion between North America and the Pacific Ridge system. Lots of craziness happens IRL with these but these are also exceptionally dangerous as the quakes in Turkey unfortunately attest. Also the Himalayan style orogeny notably needs to have a dominant fast subduction zone that can overshoot and subduct continental crust. Continental crust due to its buoyancy doesn't generally sink instead piling up on top of each other creating a super thick plateau a.k.a. the Tibetan plateau. There are also some processes which need to be accounted for when closing a subduction zone as this results in its own distinct kind of volcanic arcs slab breakage arc. Compared to subduction arcs these are taller and much more silica rich and thus more explosive representing the last gasp of a subduction zone as mantle material upwells to fill the gap created by the subducted slab breaking off. The Sierra Nevada's formed this way having been subsequently uplifted to build the modern mountain range.
A mid ocean ridge getting sucked under an ocean plate, wouldn't this still create orogeny just under the ocean? Would that be worth tracking ? Would it eventually make islands? Would the built up area have effect if it collided with continental crust later?
Honesty there’s a lot of ocean stuff he didn’t do but I think it’s just to save time or because the effects would be negligible. Always something you could track anyway tho
I cannot wait to see the actual world with the atlas stile map you've done before. Each step drawn in that style and then animated, it would look awesome.
Your tutorials are excellent and I've really enjoyed watching them. However, I think some of your workflow is a bit awkward because you move the plates independently rather than organise them as a tree or hierarchy of rotations. What the researchers who use GPlates for real-world reconstructions do is create a hierarchy of plates, usually anchored on Africa for the most recent 400 million years or so (as Africa doesn't move much relative to the other plates or the Earth's centre). When a plate breaks away from its parent, it is linked to the plate that it will collide with in the future. Rifts always expand equally on both sides, so you should also position them as half-stage rotations of the parent plates. This will ensure that the rift feature is always centred between the plates. If a subduction zone opens up along the coast of one of these plates in the future, then you create a new rift feature between the continental side and the oceanic side, and link the oceanic crust to the continent that is subducting it. To keep the oceanic crust separate from the continental crust, I put it in its own Plate ID and use a consistent numbering scheme where the first 1-2 digits indicate the parent craton, the next two digits are used for microplates, and the next two digits are used for oceanic crust. So a feature with the Plate ID of 20101 is oceanic crust attached to the first microcontinent to break away from Craton 2. I figure that even over two billion years I'm unlikely to need more than 99 of each type of feature.
Yeah, there's too many fiddly-bits that need to be edited. You'd think that a piece of software would be better at automating those details, but I guess not this one…
I want to do the entire animation on gplates, then export all the stills and then redrawn each of the frames on Flash to create a more fluid animation. Don't know if it would work, tho.
The big benefit of GPlates is that it's actually able to animate things moving around on a sphere. That said, there's things you can do to this process to make it more casual: * Ignore oceanic crust, but keep in mind that a passive margin usually turns into a subduction zone after roughly 200 million years. * Don't use cratons, just consider all continental crust to be equal (I think this is more realistic anyway) * When moving a plate, don't assign a pole of rotation, just move it whatever direction makes sense * When plates split, just have the new plate's features come into existence at the moment they split * When plates fuse, just copy all the features to one of the two plate IDs
Just wondering, if the subduction zone at 8:03 isn’t being fed, then how did an island arc form behind it? Shouldn’t an island arc not form if that subduction zone is… starving so to say?
IRL subduction zones don't just stop, the descending slab of crust keeps pulling down the descending plate(called slab pull). Either a new rift will open up parallel to the subduction zone (google tethyan style subduction), or the subduction zone will migrate with a back arc basin opening up behind it(sea of japan and phillipines sea are examples).
Don't know if I missed that part, but, would you recommend doing orogeny after we finish moving, rifting and colliding landmasses? or are there any benefits of doing it since the beginning?
I think he did it at the end because moving the landmasses is more macro that creating mountains ranges which is more micro. It follows his strict top-down approach if you think about it, but you could do it from the beggining if you want more precise control over the mountains' shapes.
Couple things: 1) North of your Himalayan orogeny, you've still got active subduction. Would not then the northern 100km of your Himalayas remain active? 2) You're subducting a Mid ocean ridge under ocean. Under a continent, that'd make a Laramide orogeny which would remain active along the coast, but with an interior volcanic region tracking the subduction until some arbitrary point where the orogeny ends, all phasing inactive after 50my. Under an ocean plate, would that not make a significant field of seamounts and, potentially, formerly volcanic islands? Might not be a big deal if you're strictly land based, but if your oceans are going to be inhabited, it'd be at least worth noting. Yeah, another collection... 3) Rather than Active/ Inactive /Old, I've been doing Volcanic, Collisional, Inactive, and Old, and I'll be adding a Submarine collection. Volcanic stays active until the Subduction zone moves or ends, then goes to inactive. Collisional is Active until the end of collision, then goes inactive. Submarine gets a different color, and never goes active - it's mostly dead seamounts, but may raise an occasional island or shelf section with repeated subduction. And old remains as described. The one fillip to this is that Laramide orogenies will have parallel ridges 100 to 500 km wide and may have cut offs as short as 1 Mya depending on how swift the subduction.
In short: you did superbly with WBP's amazing but overly technically presumptive start. There are just a few things that I either am misunderstanding or could be improved. (In addition to the above, mid ocean triple junction forming a new plate. It's where we get the Pacific, so it might be worth covering.) One day I'll finish one of these (on #12 now. Keep stalling out around 500mya in), and then maybe I'll need to grow a beard and do one of these myself.
Last thing, if I ever do complete one of these, I'll send you my Rot file assistant/ Event & Land Area tracker / Timestep action checklist. Man, you have helped me pass a vast amount of time in this, and I really appreciate it. Many thanks, Edgar. JT out.
i think the plate tectonics part might be. isn't he going to do loads of worldbuilding and stuff on this world though? and he has to do loads of other geography stuff aswell i think
While I really enjoyed the gplates series for its value, I'm super excited to move onto spec bio. I'm appalled that that mid ocean ridge didn't turn into laramide orogeny, simply APPALLED.
I'm Ape Aled!
I'm surprised that he didn't make a little it of laramide style orogeny as part of that oceanic plate subdued under and past it lol
I just imagine how awesome it would look as an atlas style map...No, seriously, those continents look awesome.
Yesterday I decided to ignore flowlines and ocean crust in my simulation, and so far I'm not regretting it. It gets rid of at least half the work and makes the process much more enjoyable. What annoyed me the most was redoing all the flowlines and ocean crusts basically at every timestamp.
Yes, there is some stuff that I'm not going to be able to simulate, but it's good enough for my purposes. I'm much more likely to actually finish my simulation after making that decision.
You don't really need the flowlines. They're helpful but recreating them is a nuisance. What I do is set my divergent boundaries to half stage rotation so they're always in the middle of the two plates, and then duplicate the line feature to draw isochrons as a hint towards ocean crust age. Although I haven't figured it out yet, with pyGPlates you can automate some of this to create seafloor age grids.
I *literally* did the absolutely identical thing. In the work of around 3 weeks, I nearly got to 750m.y point in my 1000m.y simulation, and I stuck in how complicated simulation became and just abandoned it, but I finished new simulation in around 2 weeks just getting rid of ocean crust and flowlines.
@@zoqaeski How do you set the divergent boundaries (rifts) to half stage rotation? If they're meant to stay in between two plates it needs to be tied to both plate IDs no? And how does it remain in the middle of two plates if they move in various directions including rotating?
@@Fuar11 Thats exactly what half stage rotation does
I will follow your advice ! It is indeed complicated to do them
Damn that northern landmass is just ringed with mountains!
Great place for an isolationist society 🤔
Great if you like living in the desert at least!
Keep in mind they will be significantly reduced through erosional events over time. The Black Hills, Appalachians, and the St Francois Mtns from my home state of MO are examples of old mountain ranges. Granted, those are all examples dating over 1 billion years old.
@@johng.7608 i would assume that they may be closer to britain's mountain ranges, snowdonia and the highlands, old but not that worn down.
@@johng.7608 oh, and to append to my other comment, the mountain ranges may be old, but they are mostly still active, meaning they will likely maintain their height somewhat.
@@catgirlinacvrt3696 Good points. Lot of other variables at play too: rainfall, glaciation, wind, etc.
Its probably worth noting that when you get to more modern times or accounting for paleoclimates there is another kind of mountains associated with active uplift primarily from magmatic upwelling of rifting. In this case you get Grabens and Horsts which are depressed and raised sections of crust respectively which occur when crust is pulled apart. These Horsts are often known referred to as block fault mountains and are characteristic of rift zones and other extensional environments. This overlaps with Laramide of the mid ocean ridge subduction type somewhat as the zone of upwelling can persist as is occurring beneath the Colorado plateau a section of the North American Craton which is being heated and pushed up from below causing it to rift away and melt from below dripping into the mantle(mantle drip volcanism is a thing which can result in several volcanoes getting fed magma at once in an episodic event).
This probably isn't really accounted for in popular plate tectonics models as it's very complicated and not fully understood either but it appears that in the case of major fast spreading mid ocean ridges they can indeed persist at least over 50 million years after subducting and causing major extensional block fault mountain building this seems to be because unlike how we have conventionally assumed the major oceanic plates aren't limited to the crust but extend down into the mantle to at least the Mantle Transition Zone(MTZ).
There are also transform boundaries which while they can just slide past each other they can also build mountains since they aren't always purely transform. Lots of faults are a mix of transform and either compression or extension you can even have a fault which is compressional on one end and extensional on the other due to relative rotation of the two plates sliding past each other. Yes even subduction zones can have a transverse motion Cascadia is one such example due to the relative difference in direction of motion between North America and the Pacific Ridge system. Lots of craziness happens IRL with these but these are also exceptionally dangerous as the quakes in Turkey unfortunately attest.
Also the Himalayan style orogeny notably needs to have a dominant fast subduction zone that can overshoot and subduct continental crust. Continental crust due to its buoyancy doesn't generally sink instead piling up on top of each other creating a super thick plateau a.k.a. the Tibetan plateau.
There are also some processes which need to be accounted for when closing a subduction zone as this results in its own distinct kind of volcanic arcs slab breakage arc. Compared to subduction arcs these are taller and much more silica rich and thus more explosive representing the last gasp of a subduction zone as mantle material upwells to fill the gap created by the subducted slab breaking off. The Sierra Nevada's formed this way having been subsequently uplifted to build the modern mountain range.
A mid ocean ridge getting sucked under an ocean plate, wouldn't this still create orogeny just under the ocean? Would that be worth tracking ? Would it eventually make islands? Would the built up area have effect if it collided with continental crust later?
I don't think so, because the mid ocean ridge and the plates on either side of it will just become absorbed into the mantle at that point.
Honesty there’s a lot of ocean stuff he didn’t do but I think it’s just to save time or because the effects would be negligible. Always something you could track anyway tho
I cannot wait to see the actual world with the atlas stile map you've done before. Each step drawn in that style and then animated, it would look awesome.
I like how much effort he puts in his videos!
Also, I like how almost all of tthe orogeny done in this video is Andean-sytle Orogeny. Being from Argentina, it feels quite nice.
Just checked your channel in hopes of a new video. Today is a good day!
I put some clay on a basketball to simulate techtonics manually
While I've enjoyed this I am glad you're returning to your other form of videos. Personally, I would like to see more language and culture.
Ok
Ye
I have to disagree. I like this types of tutorials on mapmaking more than the conlaging stuff.
Please do an Atlas map for this series would be really cool.
He probably will for Artifexia I'm guessing
Always happy to see a new video on your Channel!
oh yeah ! always a pleasure to see your new videos !
Hey Edgar, since the island arcs are simply underwater orogenies, should they follow the rough 100km rule too?
I’ve really appreciated how detailed this series is. Do you think you’ll ever do a WLRST again?
Your tutorials are excellent and I've really enjoyed watching them. However, I think some of your workflow is a bit awkward because you move the plates independently rather than organise them as a tree or hierarchy of rotations. What the researchers who use GPlates for real-world reconstructions do is create a hierarchy of plates, usually anchored on Africa for the most recent 400 million years or so (as Africa doesn't move much relative to the other plates or the Earth's centre). When a plate breaks away from its parent, it is linked to the plate that it will collide with in the future.
Rifts always expand equally on both sides, so you should also position them as half-stage rotations of the parent plates. This will ensure that the rift feature is always centred between the plates. If a subduction zone opens up along the coast of one of these plates in the future, then you create a new rift feature between the continental side and the oceanic side, and link the oceanic crust to the continent that is subducting it. To keep the oceanic crust separate from the continental crust, I put it in its own Plate ID and use a consistent numbering scheme where the first 1-2 digits indicate the parent craton, the next two digits are used for microplates, and the next two digits are used for oceanic crust. So a feature with the Plate ID of 20101 is oceanic crust attached to the first microcontinent to break away from Craton 2. I figure that even over two billion years I'm unlikely to need more than 99 of each type of feature.
I always thought it was errogeny, like the Latin word for wander, until I saw your video title lol
In US-English, it's definitely /OR ogeny/.
Damn I really liked the GPlates mini series!
Still excited for what's to come next :)
For a slightly more casual worldbuilder, just using an art or animation program to animate it by hand might have actually been easier.
Yeah, there's too many fiddly-bits that need to be edited. You'd think that a piece of software would be better at automating those details, but I guess not this one…
I want to do the entire animation on gplates, then export all the stills and then redrawn each of the frames on Flash to create a more fluid animation. Don't know if it would work, tho.
@@John_Weiss This software is a research project. It has a lot of very powerful features but you need to program them with Python.
@@zoqaeski Ah.
I kinda gathered, from other comments, that this is meant for palaeogeographic reconstructions, not for world building.
The big benefit of GPlates is that it's actually able to animate things moving around on a sphere. That said, there's things you can do to this process to make it more casual:
* Ignore oceanic crust, but keep in mind that a passive margin usually turns into a subduction zone after roughly 200 million years.
* Don't use cratons, just consider all continental crust to be equal (I think this is more realistic anyway)
* When moving a plate, don't assign a pole of rotation, just move it whatever direction makes sense
* When plates split, just have the new plate's features come into existence at the moment they split
* When plates fuse, just copy all the features to one of the two plate IDs
28:40 Artifexian is handing out tanks left and right like Oprah. Are you teasing a military building series? ;)
I'm excited to find out what the next videos are going to be about if there's more between now and the unveiling of Artifexia's completed geography!
Can’t wait to see this world
MORE MORE MORE GPLATES! MOORRE!
Some nice help again!
Is there any way to export the tectonic history as a video file? Or will this be covered in a later video?
Unfortunately I think you can only export a series of images which you'll have to stitch together into a video via an external program
Microsoft's Movie Maker has everything you need to turn a series of stills into a video file. It's not very elegant but it get's the job done.
Just wondering, if the subduction zone at 8:03 isn’t being fed, then how did an island arc form behind it? Shouldn’t an island arc not form if that subduction zone is… starving so to say?
IRL subduction zones don't just stop, the descending slab of crust keeps pulling down the descending plate(called slab pull). Either a new rift will open up parallel to the subduction zone (google tethyan style subduction), or the subduction zone will migrate with a back arc basin opening up behind it(sea of japan and phillipines sea are examples).
The thumbnail is my first time seeing "orogeny" written. I thought it started with e. Like in error.
Interesting. In US-English, it's pronounced with an "or": /OR ogeny/.
"Erogenous" is a word, but that's a different kind of mountain making if you get my continental drift
That is going to lead to a weird rainfall systems
I still don't understand if MOR ever stop generating new ocean crust until eaten up - I'll just assume that they do until told otherwise...
I don't know a single word this guy said or how I got here, or what is going on, but here I am and I watched the whole damn thing
25:30 Could the flip be GPlates saying that the orogeny has worn done enough to be new uplift automatically? And thank you for the series.
Wait so should you finish moving your continents before doing orogenies?
Is there another software that works like GPlates but doesn't have as much complications?
You could try Blender?
@@Duiker36 How could it work?
Goodday
24:40 Tell me why mountains don't change color? I did everything as in the video
will you make the next supercontinent in this sim?
I don't think he will. He said that the series was meant as a tutorial so this was the last gPlates video, I think...
Maybe next Large Igneous Provinces?
Do you think gaming studios need conlangers for their fantasy games?
Don't know if I missed that part, but, would you recommend doing orogeny after we finish moving, rifting and colliding landmasses? or are there any benefits of doing it since the beginning?
I think he did it at the end because moving the landmasses is more macro that creating mountains ranges which is more micro. It follows his strict top-down approach if you think about it, but you could do it from the beggining if you want more precise control over the mountains' shapes.
Do it at the end so that way you don't have to redo them if you change your mind about the tectonic motions.
How do you make a history of plate tectonics manually? Is it possible?
Couple things:
1) North of your Himalayan orogeny, you've still got active subduction. Would not then the northern 100km of your Himalayas remain active?
2) You're subducting a Mid ocean ridge under ocean. Under a continent, that'd make a Laramide orogeny which would remain active along the coast, but with an interior volcanic region tracking the subduction until some arbitrary point where the orogeny ends, all phasing inactive after 50my. Under an ocean plate, would that not make a significant field of seamounts and, potentially, formerly volcanic islands? Might not be a big deal if you're strictly land based, but if your oceans are going to be inhabited, it'd be at least worth noting. Yeah, another collection...
3) Rather than Active/ Inactive /Old, I've been doing Volcanic, Collisional, Inactive, and Old, and I'll be adding a Submarine collection. Volcanic stays active until the Subduction zone moves or ends, then goes to inactive. Collisional is Active until the end of collision, then goes inactive. Submarine gets a different color, and never goes active - it's mostly dead seamounts, but may raise an occasional island or shelf section with repeated subduction. And old remains as described. The one fillip to this is that Laramide orogenies will have parallel ridges 100 to 500 km wide and may have cut offs as short as 1 Mya depending on how swift the subduction.
In short: you did superbly with WBP's amazing but overly technically presumptive start. There are just a few things that I either am misunderstanding or could be improved. (In addition to the above, mid ocean triple junction forming a new plate. It's where we get the Pacific, so it might be worth covering.) One day I'll finish one of these (on #12 now. Keep stalling out around 500mya in), and then maybe I'll need to grow a beard and do one of these myself.
Last thing, if I ever do complete one of these, I'll send you my Rot file assistant/ Event & Land Area tracker / Timestep action checklist. Man, you have helped me pass a vast amount of time in this, and I really appreciate it. Many thanks, Edgar. JT out.
Are you still doing the WLRST thing?
I wanna do gplates soon. I just have to figure out how to update my graphics card driver...
FYI: Turkey-Syria : { ruclips.net/video/Hd4xCmuwiBw/видео.html } ~Plate'z
The landmass shapes are just bad for living organisms.
😆
Do you want to make conlang video?
Is it finally over?
i think the plate tectonics part might be. isn't he going to do loads of worldbuilding and stuff on this world though? and he has to do loads of other geography stuff aswell i think
he said that there are at least 2 more videos on this topic.