tectonic plate help!

im very new to tectonic plate interactions and i need feedback. do these boundaries make sense with the mountains on the map? also, are there any boundaries that should result in mountains or trenches?

map: https://ibb.co/HHqTN9W (background map is an edited version of mike schley's wings of fire map)

Is your world flat? If not, how do D, C, E, and F intersect? Assuming a round world, they must, but it's not clear where.

I would add to that the question of whether this represents the entire planet/world—and if it doesn't, which parts are not shown? That might affect which map-edge plates have to interact with which others, if any.

As a rule of thumb, plates are powered by subduction in trenches. So any plate with a trench will be moving in its direction. Now, from your graph it seems like plate B is growing in size and has no trench. Movement implies that there are trenches north of plate A and C, east of plate D, southwest of plate F and south of plate E, not all of them with the same strength.

That peninsula straddling plate A and plate E in the southwest would be Iceland-like. Is the tripoint between plates B, C and D just a symbol or an actual landmass?

I think the biggest problem here is the mountain chain between plates B and A. While sometimes mountain chains form on such strike-slip faults, they usually form when part of the motion is the plates approaching each other. Here, it seems like they'd be moving away from each other. OTOH, newly formed plate boundaries typically develop across pre-existent weak points, such as mountain chains. Thus, that plate boundary must be really recent - far less than a million years.

@florien @arsthaumaturgis this map only represents one contient on the planet - a good chunk of the planet isnt shown

@septimusheap thanks so much! the tripoint is not a landmass, its just a compass symbol.

i made a different version of the graph based around the central mountain range. is this more accurate? https://ibb.co/5vh4mRx

Edited by sleebykiddy on Sep 5th 2022 at 9:31:04 AM

If plate A and F (and A and C) are moving in the same direction, one wouldn't expect a boundary between them. Are they moving at different speeds?

@septimusheap yup, different speeds. mostly i just didnt want a tectonic plate that was that big... so different speeds it is

Assuming that the continent is the size of North America, these plates are fairly small. BUT, don't take that as criticism since tectonic plates can be all sorts of sizes and your world's geology doesn't have to be like Earth's.

Aye, in places like the Western Pacific there are a lot of smaller plates, similar to this structure.

I belatedly remembered that mountains can form where plates are moving apart - see East Africa - although the topography you show implies we are at the very earliest stages, before the actual rupture.

The way many of the arrows look, A and B should actually be a convergent boundary, not a transform. There’s enough implied westward motion of B and eastward of A that the whole length should be compressional not lateral.

Meaning it would be like the Alpine and Apennines Orogeny in Europe or to a degree the Zagros Fold Belts in Turkey and Iran or the Himalayan Group in Asia.

@majortom yup, made it convergent in the updated graph :]

^^I believe that the A-B boundary is both a transform and slightly convergent, the problem I see is that it's only convergent in some sectors. That kind of boundary would form several isolated mountain chains, not one through-going cordillera.

Gotta say, I'm impressed. Not many authors give plane tectonics a second thought.