I wonder if the owners of Gplates are wondering why there's so many people downloading such an obscure scientific tool. I'm sure Artifexian has more than doubled its userbase overnight.
They could, in that case, relase a more user-friendly tool. For example, in this video, Edgard has said a "this is the exact same process" a bunch of times. That would be a macro in, say, Word or Excel.
@Daniel Rossy Explica There tends to be a trend with academic software, accurate and stupid or inaccurate but user friendly for educational purpase so not very robust in what it can do.
I am disappointed it is just an animator. I should just be able to tell the program where forces are and pause to create rifts whenever I like to. Then it should do all the movements on its own.
I really hope you go all the way with this series, I'm having so much fun building my world in GPlates with these as a guide. I've noticed the views dropping off lately and have got my fingers crossed that the series will continue. Thank you Edgar, we appreciate all the hard work you're putting into this!
Yup! Views are declining. Not as many people interested in this as the other stuff. Fortunately, I have a strong following on patreon which allows me to not worry too much about the views.
@@Artifexian while they may decline temporarily, these kinds of videos garner views well into the future from people interested in the software! Having these resources is invaluable.
as someone who hasn't watched all these GPlates videos, for me it's because this part seems rather unnecessary for most people (or at least for me). all the astro stuff had real narrative implications while being very restricted in scientific terms. perfect combination for creativity: a constraint with freedom. but these GPlates videos are just not that at all. it feels like those people who make entire proto-langs before making their conlang instead of making their conlang _as if_ it had a proto lang. part of me really just wants to draw some basic shapes in GPlates and have it run a billion years automatically and then tweak the final results. i watch some of these videos and think "ok cool but when are we getting to the worldbuilding". But that's me. no one is forcing me to watch them. I'm having fun with the series in my own way. Not that there's anything wrong with either type of worldbuilding or either type of video. we're hear to have fun and there's no wrong way to do that. but to me, there seem to be 2 types of people and the first few videos were helpful to both, whereas these are helpful to only 1. As someone who also makes videos, i make them for me and for the people who like them. I'm not trying to make stuff to _get_ people to like it. i'm making stuff that people who are already into it will like. Edgar seems to be doing that and more power to him.
Thanks to you I've been playing with G plates the entire week, and I discovered some things that you might find useful: 1. When you change the anchored plate in the rotation file, you don't have to look up the new coordinates of the plate in the 'Total reconstruction poles' menu. If the coordinates are still '0.0 0.0 0.0' relative to the parent plate (which is most of the time true), the new coords of the child plate are simply the current coords of the parent. Thus, you can simply copy the coordinates from inside the rotation file. 2. Be careful with the kinematics tool. The speed that is displayed is dependent on the latitude and longitude of the plate. However, if you press the button 'Use focussed feature', Gplates will fill in the Long Lat and plate id of the currently selected continent. You can also first select eg island arcs to see what the speed is at that location. Om large plates or plates with a lot of rotation, there can be a significant difference.
The last few episodes have felt slow and didn't really have enough info. This one bucked that trend and actually felt like stuff was moving (maybe it was becuase you were using like all the process you've talked about up till now; don't know). Good work, looking forward to collisions
That seems accurate. I definitely didn't feel like the pace for the previous episodes was inappropriate, GPlates just has a stupid steep learning curve
Thanks for your Amazing work! For anyone wondering, this is how you would do if you had a fourth plate, Craton D, which follows C for now, but who you want to follow B: Decouple B from C as shown in the video Then, you decouple D from C as shown in the video BUT you change the line "Start Moving independently". For the plate ID on the right, you put B's plate ID. For the coordinates, you need to have the "with anchored plate ID" set to B's ID in the ctrl/cmd+p menu. To do that, you do ctrl/cmd+d, enter B's plate ID, and then, you just go back to ctrl+p Menu and copy the coordinates. And then don't forget the drift correction (I know this comment is 1 year late, if you need help, because I'm not very clear, I can still reply years later)
Hey! I'm attempting to do this right now, but after I change the "with anchored plate ID" setting to B and pull up the ctrl+p menu the coordinates of Craton D show up as indeterminate. Do you have any idea as why that may be?
@@marissonsoneur8700 Is it something meant for those 18+? Is that what makes it sus? If that's the case, then I'm sure Artefexian didn't mean for it to come off that way.
When splitting oceanic crust, you can also just make the original plate into one of the two new halves. Also, for anyone who, like me, needed to change the parent of an ID, it's easy: you just put one "90.0 0.0 0.0" line at the time you want to change parents, then another but change the parent ID to the new parent. For example: 009 900.0 90.0 0.0 0.0 007 ! Start moving with ID 7 009 900.0 90.0 0.0 0.0 006 ! Stop moving with ID 6
When I do that, the two cratons I want to change the parent ID of move somewhere else randomly on the map. I've been trying to fix this for the past half hour, I don't know what to do
@@pico1136 I managed to fix the problem by adding another line in the .rot file. So first I decoupled it and made it free and then I coupled it again. For some reason it fixed the issue for me. EX: 500 900.0 90.0 0.0 0.0 600 ! 500 900.0 49.37 137.155 -33.4362 000 ! 500 900.0 90.0 0.0 0.0 100 !
Hey Edgar, I have a question about the project. Once WorldbuildingPasta finishes your Gplates simulation will you make a detailed, atlas style map? If that's not part of your plan you should consider adding it to the roster. I've been rewatching your atlas map making series and you did such beautiful work there, and that was with a planet with inaccurate geology. Something to think about, I love the series so far.
So..... in order to have the triple junction ocean rifts wouldn't the rifting all have to occur at the same general time? Like I'm having trouble understanding why it retroactively walked all the way back to the original. Shouldn't the second ridge be localized to the actual rifting event? I ask because the North African rift Valley does not seem to have any connection to the European split that occurred. If someone could help make sense of this I would be appreciative.
Really great videos! As a physics student, I really love how you use (sometimes simplified) science to build your world. You explain everything really well. I got a couple of questions tho. 1. Shouldn't the 0.0 timestamp of the 200 plate also be unlinked from the 300 plate in the rotation file? I don't know if that gives an error in GPlates or not, but it seems more logical to me. 2. Wouldn't it be more likely that the second rift event was connected to the triple junction that created the original failed rift. So that the triple junction of the mid-ocean ridges falls together with the original triple junction mantle plume. I don't know enough about plate tectonics to know if this is more likely or not 😅. Maybe if anyone knows more about this?
I'm pretty sure, once rifting occurs, there isn't really anything keeping the plume going. The whole reason magma plumes occur and form triple junctions is because of the old, light continental crust above them, but the crust created at a rift is young and dense, so I would imagine the plume can get pushed all over the place or even eventually disappear entirely
For anyone as Stupid as me who had problems with Craton not following the Continent they now should, here is a quick fix: Let's Say we have a Supercontinent like the one in the Tutorial, except there's a small "Craton 400" next to Craton 200. To make Craton 400 Follow Craton 200, you just have to change the ID of the Craton it's following at the End to the ID of the Craton it should now follow.
Good stuff, Edgar. Triple Junction Flowlines, extending Subduction along oceanic crusts, and then adding Island arcs on the ocean crust are things which hadn't occurred to me. Thanks!
Note that with regards to subduction zones they don't always form near the shifted movement of the plate often they form out in the open ocean particularly where oceanic crust has existing fault lines with crust of different ages Also might be worth remembering that mid ocean ridges tend to be composed of relatively straight rifts each of which are offset by transform faults giving them a distinctive zig zag largely from their origin via triple junctions. The older the ocean the more complex and meandering these seem to get with the relatively young North Atlantic being fairly straight compared to its far older southern counterpart. This might help make some of these ocean floors seem more natural.
got some weird *.rot errors, something about duplications and some cratons did not follow what it was supposed to. good thing i have a backup, otherwise its time for that restart again
Even with just 3 cratons, I still got a little excited when I realized that the island chain on continent 200 was going to loop around and totally envelop a region of ocean. And when he mentioned the micro continent colliding with continent 300. Like, looking at a map is not nearly as interesting as watching that map move and realizing what the potential implications are.
I ran into a problem where my plates who didn't go independent but switched to another plate were doing werid movements, but I think i fixed it by not copying those coordinates and keeping them at 9.0 0.0 0.0. Is this how you do it?
Are you ever going to make a WorldSmith sheet for P-type and S-type star systems? I'm trying to develop a system centered around G-type and K-type main sequence stars. But I keep running into problems on the WorldSmith because none of the sheets account for things like the combined mass and luminosity of the stars.
Hello Edgar, just came back to this video to say thankyou for all your hard work. I find it gives me inspiration for my own work. Though I have read worldbuildingpasta's work I find the information easier to understand with your work to supplement it. I wish I was financially able to support you in gratitude for your efforts, alas I am poor, so the best I can do is watch the adds in your video and hope UA-cam is paying you correctly for it.
so odd question: how would i do this if i want a LOT more land? i have some very unrealistic fantasy elements already so i'm not too worried about the consequences to the climate as i'll just handwave that, but could i use this process there too or would it be better to keep working on my old gplates model which only does the present based of the old videos?
Yea my flowlines are definitely crossing. I don't think theres a way for them not to cross. Short of saying, "just don't have your contenent fracture there" I'm not sure what to do about basicly a pinch between two rifts. A part of my contenet has to wedge itself between two lines to get out into unmapped sea.
When changing the rotation file i get an error telling me "Error reading the fixed plate ID" "The pole was discarded" what should i do ? I can no detach my cratons from the ones they used to move, i checked the lines for over an hour now and i did everything like it is in the video
I have a small question how do you change the flowing cartons that flow a craton. How do split multiple cartons and then let one or more flow the new spilt of the continent?
At 10:00 when Artifexian is inputting the rotation values from the Total Reconstruction Poles, he's doing unnecessary work (perhaps there are instances when it matters, but not here) as plate ID 200 and 300 share the same rotation values. Just copy it form the rotation file, from the parent ID to the ID splitting from it.
I've been playing around with this method for well a few years now, getting a bit better at it each time, but actually seeing how to deal with triple junctures is the first time dealing with them ever made any sense! Thanks! Hopefully this go around my flow lines won't start great but turn into a mess... And maybe figure out how to deal with Plate Topologies... and the isochrons thing Robbie talks about in the comments of world building pasta... Anyways really looking forward to seeing if anything else clicks when seeing your explanations!
I having problem with rift that I created and when I put 1 as an Id it does a weird thing it does not stay where it supposed to be but it kinda moves to the middle
This series is amazing so far. Huge nerd, huge fan, and huge hope that you pull through with this series, because the mapping videos are getting real exciting. I wonder, when your modern day map is completed, will there be a part in the series about mapping currents and climates, since Worldbuilding Pasta made a post about that field?
@@VelociraptorsOfSkyrim The size of the plate does matter, but less than what is driving it. Large continental masses have deeper keels which are anchored further into the asthenosphere and which can slow down plates. The biggest factor is the size and strength of the subduction zone, if any, followed by the ratio of continental to oceanic crust. Oceanic crust moves two to three times faster.
Hmm I find it easier to just create the features separated if ik i'm gonna split something, that way it's a simple matter of decoupling the cratons in script
For sure! But sometimes you won't know in advance what you would like to do, it'll just fall out of the evolution and so you'll need to know how to decouple things.
Love the series, makes me want to Cook up a whole New World. Question: since time has passed since the first rifting Event that lead to the formation of the island arcs, would it be appropriate to redraw them, adding more Land?
I wouldn't bother. I myself draw island arcs as these elongated blob shapes, rather than the neat little islands Edgar uses. :-) The critical part really is the age of the feature, so unless you're at the end of the simulation and converting the map into a more detailed form, island arcs are best kept pretty abstract.
I believe in previous video he mentioned it's rather supposed to be done afterwards, if those islands will survive at all. I'm sure he'll get to it... eventually.
Well if you were doing a more complex realistic scenario it would most likely be important as there are a number of processes which can occur along subduction zones ranging from; 1) Back arc formation: moving the subduction zone away from land and or the plate boundary(a.k.a. the Sea of Japan forming to pull the continental volcanic arc along the eastern edge of Eurasia out into the Pacific creating mainland Japan), 2) Wedge accretion: a major process when subduction pulls in oceanic plateaus seamounts or other volcanic arcs also tends to result in more voluminous/frequent volcanism. such as seen with the Aleutians accreting and subducting Yakutat, i.e. the upper portion of the oceanic plateau gets added to the overlying plate while the lower part gets subducted feeding into the high rates of volcanism. A more extreme example of this is the subduction of the Ontong Java plateau which drives the high rates of volcanism there which leads to volcanos outputting high rates of material to reach towering heights before sealing off their own magmatic conduits and going quiet only to reawaken once the pressure builds up to overcome the weight leading to highly explosive caldera forming eruptions i.e. VEI 8 Toba and the VEI 7 eruptions of Krakatau(536 AD), Samalas(1257 AD), and Tambora (1815 AD). The destruction is also fairly cyclic as the much more famous 1883 eruption of Krakatau shows. On the flip side volcanic arcs can also collapse as the balance of the subducting slab and the towering volcanic arcs shifts the net result is some of Earth's most explosive and intense high silica volcanism which have often been termed Ignimbrite flare ups due to the distinctive heat welded dense pyroclastic deposits that are associated with only the most explosive and violent eruptions. This kind of event has often been labeled "slab rollback events" though that description looks to be a bit over simplistic it is still relatively descriptive as it usually involves a shift in the angle or distance which subduction occurs. This seems to be associated with a volcanic arc subducting younger hotter less dense crust as it approaches a mid ocean ridge. The age of an arc does under a simplistic assumption that these processes are random in their occurrence give a rough estimate for the size and complexity of a volcanic arc but technically you can build larger complex arcs far more quickly with the right kind of subduction and the relative angle of subduction which varies considerably from one arc to another and even along a single volcanic arc. For example an old arc which gets hit by destructive events probably isn't going to grow anywhere near as quickly as an arc which has been fed volcanic plateaus and carbonate reef complexes especially when 2 or more volcanic arcs effectively fuse together because the intervening oceanic plate runs out. This basically gives some license to cheat the rules though I'd argue you need to be careful and justify it to keep things consistent.
@@Dragrath1 That sort of stuff is way beyond most of our pay grades, even if it is hella interesting. I guess it might make for some cool later additions when you're familiar with the basics.
For some reason, when I add flowlines and do the Add points in the properties window the button is greyed out after the first one. The first time I do it, it works just fine. The flowlines work how they're supposed to. If I save, close it out, open it back up, I can then add another set. Do you have any idea why it would be doing that? I downloaded the program about two weeks ago, so it should be up to date.
Hey, Artifexian, would it be possible to add a black hole calculator page to the spreadsheet? I tried making my own calculator for it, but that ended in a habitable zone by luminosity larger than the Milky Way, and that was at just 10 solar masses. I would love to see how versatile you would be able to make the black holes, and see how they then affect the planets around them.
I have some doubts about the continental rift features. At some point i wanted to split comoving plates from a certain part, but due to some angle limitations i couldn't and had to split them far from where i originally planed. I want to avoid this issue in the future, so I want to know if i could make new continental rift features, not one each time step but at least one each continental split if necessary.
A couple of suggestions to make your project harder: Have you thought of putting in an Iceland-like formation above one of those major rifts? A meteor or a simple anomaly in the crust can explain a chain of islands similar to the Hawaii hotspot. How are you going to go about deciding is your world in an ice age or not? If you need more land you can always say that there was a warm climate and cool it down to make some ice sheets and subtract some water from your coasts. You are doing fantastic work and can't wait to see more of it.
I really love this series, but I would really need something similar for a toroidal planet. Any ideas? In fact I think I'll just forget plate tectonics on my half-realistic half-fantasy torus
@@davidguerin6142 gplates is scientists' plaything. You won't find a program for a realistic toroidal planet, bc that's an oxymoron. If you're going realistic: then revisit the drawing board. If you're Sticking with toroidal, then you shouldn't "slightly want" such a finiky program like gplates. :p
@@theorixlux I was asking that half as a joke and half seriously :P I like the diversity of landscapes and inspiration that plate tectonics can give, even though the tectonic regime of a torus is not a scientific question.
@@davidguerin6142 well, I think I see what you're going for. my unqualified opinion would be: a torus body would not affect tectonics differently than a sphere does. Why? Assuming your celestial body large enough, then a singular point on the surface would see a flat plane. Example: humans look at the horizon and see a mostly flat line, which does not suggest the true shape of the world. Only effects felt on or near the surface affect the surface. Things like subduction? Differences in density. Proof? Look at earth and the moon. On the scale of the lifetime of a continent, the moon passes by overhead so quickly and often, that it would appear as if the earth had a constant halo of matter around it. This COULD look similar to what a continent on a donut feels. Aside from making mountains on the inner circle steeper and taller, I don't think tectonics will change much.
Hi Artifexian, thanks for the guides. I have a question, it would really help, when at the end, you could say what would be reasonable to have happen with out plates. For example. Last time you showed your "other" reference continent. But this time you didn't and when we have multiple plates, as we are operating between 8 and 12, how many "breaks" should happen between our comoving clusters? Is 2 continents to 4, 6, 8, 10 continents reasonable? Is it unreasonable? Or can we just go crazy with what we want?
I think you can pretty much get away with what you want. If you think of Earth since the breakup of Pangaea, there were first two continents, Gondwana in the south (South America, Africa, Australia, and Antarctica) and Laurasia in the north (North America, Europe, and Asia). Then the Atlantic Ocean started to open up, splitting the Americas from the larger continents and leaving them as island continents with intermittent connections to other continents. Eventually, Antarctica and Australia split from Africa, and India split from Africa separately, and then Antarctica and Australia split from each other. And eventually Africa collided with Eurasia, and the Americas reconnected. That's a bit of a tangent, but the point is, there were a lot of rifting events, and eventually some recombining, so there are a lot of possibilities. You just have to remember that subduction zones are what drive rifting events and they're the main driver of plate motion.
Hey Edgar two quick points. First you said in the last video that you were going to discuss island arcs joining continents (those ones attached to plate 200). And second you also said that Island arcs tend to grow over 50MY. Are you planning on getting into those in the next video at all?
He'll clearly get to those when they naturally come up in this particular simulation. So, probably when the microcontinent goes to collide next time, it might run into that northern island arc and prompt that discussion of "how does it attach, and how big is it now?" Or else in the episode following, if he has nothing else to to show us that should come first, he'll push continent 200 around until that chain runs into another continent. Saying he'll get to it doesn't mean anything about when, just that you can patiently trust that he will.
The subduction zone stuff is only useful if you are not working from a complete map of tectonic plates... The subduction zones would be where these plates run into other ocean crust area of other plates so. Generally i think you should be working with a full map if you're doing this because not doing so introduces a level of unreality you're trying to avoid by doing all this to begin with.
I am hoping when worldbuilding pasta finishes up his plate history, that Artifexian does a little run through/overview of what and why things happened.
"Generally i think you should be working with a full map if you're doing this because not doing so introduces a level of unreality you're trying to avoid by doing all this to begin with." Disagree with this. First off, I am. Just because the surrounding ocean plates (the grey areas) are underspecified doesn't mean, I'm not thinking about them. Secondly, the continents will reassemble themselves on the other side of the globe forming the second supercontinent (remember we want to bring the planet through at least two supercontinent cycles). When this occurs we'll have the "full map" you're asking for, which we'll then evolve forward a little bit more to get the modern world.
why do you have to do drift correction everytimes ? Why can't you just do that at the very end when you have done every movement ? Wouldn't it save time ?
You could do that. Though, I suspect you'll end up wanting to corrected it a couple of times along the way. I'm doing a sort of "textbook" tutorial here so an being overly precise.
Hi Edgar, Hi interweb. I wanted to submit a personal question and issue. (Already tried in the last vid but got no answer, let's try again here) Hope I can find at least like-minded souls, if not actual answers and advice. I'm 27, from Italy, and I work on shifts in the customer service field, so not the most creative job. My original passion/profession for voice acting got busted by covid and in the past 2 years I've just been looking for stability, and maybe found it. But I'm realizing that doing this for literally the rest of my life would kill me. Worldbuilding, drawing fantasy maps and imagining fictional settings and pitches are passions of mine, and I also have a fair basis on realistic topography and ecology due to a year in university (later dropped). I was fantasizing about making a living out of it, and wondered if I could gather any insight on how to do so, apart from opening an instagram page with pics of my maps, posts about settings/worlds I could build, and opening a patreon account... Dunno, I feel that's less likely to happen than a flying donkey (as we say here, lol) Any advice for this desperate soul? Of course goes without saiyng, I love the channel and the content and the community, and was reason of pride when I got featured in one of the wlrst series
One of the best ways to get someone interested in a world is with a good story. People likely wouldn't be speakign elvish to this day if LOTR and The HObbit weren't published. If you aren't able/willing to write the stories yourself, you could certainly write "pitches" and then hire ghost writers.
I know it's too late to say that but I feel like just enlarging continents would make it easier to relate during world building. Also I think that it would help with placing climate zones later. Nice video anyway.
I wonder if the owners of Gplates are wondering why there's so many people downloading such an obscure scientific tool. I'm sure Artifexian has more than doubled its userbase overnight.
They could, in that case, relase a more user-friendly tool. For example, in this video, Edgard has said a "this is the exact same process" a bunch of times. That would be a macro in, say, Word or Excel.
@Daniel Rossy Explica There tends to be a trend with academic software, accurate and stupid or inaccurate but user friendly for educational purpase so not very robust in what it can do.
The blog post this is based on is actually linked on the gplates website, so they're at least vaguely aware.
I am disappointed it is just an animator. I should just be able to tell the program where forces are and pause to create rifts whenever I like to. Then it should do all the movements on its own.
@@markusklyver6277 Maybe you can compute forces with PyGPlates ?
I really hope you go all the way with this series, I'm having so much fun building my world in GPlates with these as a guide. I've noticed the views dropping off lately and have got my fingers crossed that the series will continue. Thank you Edgar, we appreciate all the hard work you're putting into this!
Yup! Views are declining. Not as many people interested in this as the other stuff. Fortunately, I have a strong following on patreon which allows me to not worry too much about the views.
@@Artifexian thank Olympus!!!
This series really rocks my mind!
@@Artifexian while they may decline temporarily, these kinds of videos garner views well into the future from people interested in the software! Having these resources is invaluable.
@@nikolaanicic3944 That's the nice part, years later people will still look into the complete series.
as someone who hasn't watched all these GPlates videos, for me it's because this part seems rather unnecessary for most people (or at least
for me). all the astro stuff had real narrative implications while being very restricted in scientific terms. perfect combination for creativity: a constraint with freedom.
but these GPlates videos are just not that at all. it feels like those people who make entire proto-langs before making their conlang instead of making their conlang _as if_ it had a proto lang. part of me really just wants to draw some basic shapes in GPlates and have it run a billion years automatically and then tweak the final results. i watch some of these videos and think "ok cool but when are we getting to the worldbuilding". But that's me. no one is forcing me to watch them. I'm having fun with the series in my own way.
Not that there's anything wrong with either type of worldbuilding or either type of video. we're hear to have fun and there's no wrong way to do that. but to me, there seem to be 2 types of people and the first few videos were helpful to both, whereas these are helpful to only 1.
As someone who also makes videos, i make them for me and for the people who like them. I'm not trying to make stuff to _get_ people to like it. i'm making stuff that people who are already into it will like. Edgar seems to be doing that and more power to him.
Thanks to you I've been playing with G plates the entire week, and I discovered some things that you might find useful:
1. When you change the anchored plate in the rotation file, you don't have to look up the new coordinates of the plate in the 'Total reconstruction poles' menu. If the coordinates are still '0.0 0.0 0.0' relative to the parent plate (which is most of the time true), the new coords of the child plate are simply the current coords of the parent. Thus, you can simply copy the coordinates from inside the rotation file.
2. Be careful with the kinematics tool. The speed that is displayed is dependent on the latitude and longitude of the plate. However, if you press the button 'Use focussed feature', Gplates will fill in the Long Lat and plate id of the currently selected continent. You can also first select eg island arcs to see what the speed is at that location. Om large plates or plates with a lot of rotation, there can be a significant difference.
The last few episodes have felt slow and didn't really have enough info. This one bucked that trend and actually felt like stuff was moving (maybe it was becuase you were using like all the process you've talked about up till now; don't know). Good work, looking forward to collisions
That seems accurate. I definitely didn't feel like the pace for the previous episodes was inappropriate, GPlates just has a stupid steep learning curve
Ye, naturally things will move fast as we go on cause I'll just be repeated the techniques I've already covered in the previous videos.
Thanks for your Amazing work!
For anyone wondering, this is how you would do if you had a fourth plate, Craton D, which follows C for now, but who you want to follow B:
Decouple B from C as shown in the video
Then, you decouple D from C as shown in the video BUT you change the line "Start Moving independently". For the plate ID on the right, you put B's plate ID.
For the coordinates, you need to have the "with anchored plate ID" set to B's ID in the ctrl/cmd+p menu. To do that, you do ctrl/cmd+d, enter B's plate ID, and then, you just go back to ctrl+p Menu and copy the coordinates.
And then don't forget the drift correction
(I know this comment is 1 year late, if you need help, because I'm not very clear, I can still reply years later)
Hey! I'm attempting to do this right now, but after I change the "with anchored plate ID" setting to B and pull up the ctrl+p menu the coordinates of Craton D show up as indeterminate. Do you have any idea as why that may be?
Yo that beginning thingy looks kinda sus
Relevant profile pic
How? I didn't see any Among Us crewmates or imposters.
@@airmanon7213 worse.
@@marissonsoneur8700 Is it something meant for those 18+? Is that what makes it sus? If that's the case, then I'm sure Artefexian didn't mean for it to come off that way.
Must... Resist... Dick joke...
I’m excited for the speczoo!
That's what I'm waiting, too, though this part is still interesting.
When splitting oceanic crust, you can also just make the original plate into one of the two new halves. Also, for anyone who, like me, needed to change the parent of an ID, it's easy: you just put one "90.0 0.0 0.0" line at the time you want to change parents, then another but change the parent ID to the new parent. For example:
009 900.0 90.0 0.0 0.0 007 ! Start moving with ID 7
009 900.0 90.0 0.0 0.0 006 ! Stop moving with ID 6
Thank you so much ! Just don't forget to change the last (higher on the text bc GP reads backward) :
009 0.0 90.0 0.0 0.0 007 ! ID 9 End
you are a life saver, I have been trying to figure this out for the last hour and a half, just staring into the screen confused
@@analucia8762 Me too :)
When I do that, the two cratons I want to change the parent ID of move somewhere else randomly on the map. I've been trying to fix this for the past half hour, I don't know what to do
@@pico1136 I managed to fix the problem by adding another line in the .rot file. So first I decoupled it and made it free and then I coupled it again. For some reason it fixed the issue for me. EX:
500 900.0 90.0 0.0 0.0 600 !
500 900.0 49.37 137.155 -33.4362 000 !
500 900.0 90.0 0.0 0.0 100 !
Hey Edgar, I have a question about the project. Once WorldbuildingPasta finishes your Gplates simulation will you make a detailed, atlas style map? If that's not part of your plan you should consider adding it to the roster. I've been rewatching your atlas map making series and you did such beautiful work there, and that was with a planet with inaccurate geology. Something to think about, I love the series so far.
So..... in order to have the triple junction ocean rifts wouldn't the rifting all have to occur at the same general time?
Like I'm having trouble understanding why it retroactively walked all the way back to the original. Shouldn't the second ridge be localized to the actual rifting event?
I ask because the North African rift Valley does not seem to have any connection to the European split that occurred. If someone could help make sense of this I would be appreciative.
Really great videos! As a physics student, I really love how you use (sometimes simplified) science to build your world. You explain everything really well. I got a couple of questions tho.
1. Shouldn't the 0.0 timestamp of the 200 plate also be unlinked from the 300 plate in the rotation file? I don't know if that gives an error in GPlates or not, but it seems more logical to me.
2. Wouldn't it be more likely that the second rift event was connected to the triple junction that created the original failed rift. So that the triple junction of the mid-ocean ridges falls together with the original triple junction mantle plume. I don't know enough about plate tectonics to know if this is more likely or not 😅. Maybe if anyone knows more about this?
I'm pretty sure, once rifting occurs, there isn't really anything keeping the plume going. The whole reason magma plumes occur and form triple junctions is because of the old, light continental crust above them, but the crust created at a rift is young and dense, so I would imagine the plume can get pushed all over the place or even eventually disappear entirely
For anyone as Stupid as me who had problems with Craton not following the Continent they now should, here is a quick fix:
Let's Say we have a Supercontinent like the one in the Tutorial, except there's a small "Craton 400" next to Craton 200. To make Craton 400 Follow Craton 200, you just have to change the ID of the Craton it's following at the End to the ID of the Craton it should now follow.
I'm studying this so that I can apply it to the Fire Nation and Earth Kingdom.
Send help.
Time 1000 MYA, Time 900 MYA: We're so done.
Time 1 MYA: We're so back.
9 minutes and im already here!
Also add a meteorite impact crater on one of the continets for astetics
10:04 for all my europeans out there, be carefull and check the coordinates are separated by a dot and not a comma
Good stuff, Edgar. Triple Junction Flowlines, extending Subduction along oceanic crusts, and then adding Island arcs on the ocean crust are things which hadn't occurred to me. Thanks!
Note that with regards to subduction zones they don't always form near the shifted movement of the plate often they form out in the open ocean particularly where oceanic crust has existing fault lines with crust of different ages
Also might be worth remembering that mid ocean ridges tend to be composed of relatively straight rifts each of which are offset by transform faults giving them a distinctive zig zag largely from their origin via triple junctions. The older the ocean the more complex and meandering these seem to get with the relatively young North Atlantic being fairly straight compared to its far older southern counterpart. This might help make some of these ocean floors seem more natural.
Have you considered offering a Fiverr gig? People would pay you to do this for their fictional worlds.
got some weird *.rot errors, something about duplications and some cratons did not follow what it was supposed to. good thing i have a backup, otherwise its time for that restart again
Yes! Keep backups. Always very useful
Even with just 3 cratons, I still got a little excited when I realized that the island chain on continent 200 was going to loop around and totally envelop a region of ocean. And when he mentioned the micro continent colliding with continent 300. Like, looking at a map is not nearly as interesting as watching that map move and realizing what the potential implications are.
Agreed! Every moment is a story waiting to be told.
Great work keep it up.
I ran into a problem where my plates who didn't go independent but switched to another plate were doing werid movements, but I think i fixed it by not copying those coordinates and keeping them at 9.0 0.0 0.0. Is this how you do it?
I seem to be having the same problem at the moment
Are you ever going to make a WorldSmith sheet for P-type and S-type star systems? I'm trying to develop a system centered around G-type and K-type main sequence stars. But I keep running into problems on the WorldSmith because none of the sheets account for things like the combined mass and luminosity of the stars.
Hello Edgar, just came back to this video to say thankyou for all your hard work. I find it gives me inspiration for my own work. Though I have read worldbuildingpasta's work I find the information easier to understand with your work to supplement it.
I wish I was financially able to support you in gratitude for your efforts, alas I am poor, so the best I can do is watch the adds in your video and hope UA-cam is paying you correctly for it.
This lonely green flowline wouldn't be there if you have split the rift realistically in the last episode.
so odd question: how would i do this if i want a LOT more land? i have some very unrealistic fantasy elements already so i'm not too worried about the consequences to the climate as i'll just handwave that, but could i use this process there too or would it be better to keep working on my old gplates model which only does the present based of the old videos?
Yea my flowlines are definitely crossing. I don't think theres a way for them not to cross. Short of saying, "just don't have your contenent fracture there" I'm not sure what to do about basicly a pinch between two rifts. A part of my contenet has to wedge itself between two lines to get out into unmapped sea.
I’m also having that issue. What are the repercussions of having a landmass move other a rift or two flow lines intersecting?
When changing the rotation file i get an error telling me "Error reading the fixed plate ID" "The pole was discarded" what should i do ? I can no detach my cratons from the ones they used to move, i checked the lines for over an hour now and i did everything like it is in the video
I have a small question how do you change the flowing cartons that flow a craton. How do split multiple cartons and then let one or more flow the new spilt of the continent?
At 10:00 when Artifexian is inputting the rotation values from the Total Reconstruction Poles, he's doing unnecessary work (perhaps there are instances when it matters, but not here) as plate ID 200 and 300 share the same rotation values. Just copy it form the rotation file, from the parent ID to the ID splitting from it.
But wait, there's more!
Yes
I've been playing around with this method for well a few years now, getting a bit better at it each time, but actually seeing how to deal with triple junctures is the first time dealing with them ever made any sense! Thanks! Hopefully this go around my flow lines won't start great but turn into a mess... And maybe figure out how to deal with Plate Topologies... and the isochrons thing Robbie talks about in the comments of world building pasta... Anyways really looking forward to seeing if anything else clicks when seeing your explanations!
16:32 instructions unclear, i have island arc flow lines that stop at nothing
I having problem with rift that I created and when I put 1 as an Id it does a weird thing it does not stay where it supposed to be but it kinda moves to the middle
This series is amazing so far. Huge nerd, huge fan, and huge hope that you pull through with this series, because the mapping videos are getting real exciting.
I wonder, when your modern day map is completed, will there be a part in the series about mapping currents and climates, since Worldbuilding Pasta made a post about that field?
When a continent breaks apart like this would the smaller chunk move faster or are there too many other forces in play to know for sure?
Not necessarily. From my understanding, the size of the Continent has little to no effect on the speed of the plate.
@@VelociraptorsOfSkyrim Good to know. I guess my mind was thinking on smaller scales and things.
Also interesting user name.
@@kairon156 Thanks
@@VelociraptorsOfSkyrim The size of the plate does matter, but less than what is driving it. Large continental masses have deeper keels which are anchored further into the asthenosphere and which can slow down plates. The biggest factor is the size and strength of the subduction zone, if any, followed by the ratio of continental to oceanic crust. Oceanic crust moves two to three times faster.
Hmm I find it easier to just create the features separated if ik i'm gonna split something, that way it's a simple matter of decoupling the cratons in script
For sure! But sometimes you won't know in advance what you would like to do, it'll just fall out of the evolution and so you'll need to know how to decouple things.
@@Artifexian true,, btw i forgot to say, really great videos, can't wait to see how you workwith collisions
p.s. where your tectonics at?
Pp continent
Love the series, makes me want to Cook up a whole New World.
Question: since time has passed since the first rifting Event that lead to the formation of the island arcs, would it be appropriate to redraw them, adding more Land?
I wouldn't bother. I myself draw island arcs as these elongated blob shapes, rather than the neat little islands Edgar uses. :-) The critical part really is the age of the feature, so unless you're at the end of the simulation and converting the map into a more detailed form, island arcs are best kept pretty abstract.
I believe in previous video he mentioned it's rather supposed to be done afterwards, if those islands will survive at all. I'm sure he'll get to it... eventually.
Well if you were doing a more complex realistic scenario it would most likely be important as there are a number of processes which can occur along subduction zones ranging from;
1) Back arc formation: moving the subduction zone away from land and or the plate boundary(a.k.a. the Sea of Japan forming to pull the continental volcanic arc along the eastern edge of Eurasia out into the Pacific creating mainland Japan),
2) Wedge accretion: a major process when subduction pulls in oceanic plateaus seamounts or other volcanic arcs also tends to result in more voluminous/frequent volcanism. such as seen with the Aleutians accreting and subducting Yakutat, i.e. the upper portion of the oceanic plateau gets added to the overlying plate while the lower part gets subducted feeding into the high rates of volcanism.
A more extreme example of this is the subduction of the Ontong Java plateau which drives the high rates of volcanism there which leads to volcanos outputting high rates of material to reach towering heights before sealing off their own magmatic conduits and going quiet only to reawaken once the pressure builds up to overcome the weight leading to highly explosive caldera forming eruptions i.e. VEI 8 Toba and the VEI 7 eruptions of Krakatau(536 AD), Samalas(1257 AD), and Tambora (1815 AD). The destruction is also fairly cyclic as the much more famous 1883 eruption of Krakatau shows.
On the flip side volcanic arcs can also collapse as the balance of the subducting slab and the towering volcanic arcs shifts the net result is some of Earth's most explosive and intense high silica volcanism which have often been termed Ignimbrite flare ups due to the distinctive heat welded dense pyroclastic deposits that are associated with only the most explosive and violent eruptions. This kind of event has often been labeled "slab rollback events" though that description looks to be a bit over simplistic it is still relatively descriptive as it usually involves a shift in the angle or distance which subduction occurs. This seems to be associated with a volcanic arc subducting younger hotter less dense crust as it approaches a mid ocean ridge.
The age of an arc does under a simplistic assumption that these processes are random in their occurrence give a rough estimate for the size and complexity of a volcanic arc but technically you can build larger complex arcs far more quickly with the right kind of subduction and the relative angle of subduction which varies considerably from one arc to another and even along a single volcanic arc. For example an old arc which gets hit by destructive events probably isn't going to grow anywhere near as quickly as an arc which has been fed volcanic plateaus and carbonate reef complexes especially when 2 or more volcanic arcs effectively fuse together because the intervening oceanic plate runs out.
This basically gives some license to cheat the rules though I'd argue you need to be careful and justify it to keep things consistent.
@@Dragrath1 That sort of stuff is way beyond most of our pay grades, even if it is hella interesting. I guess it might make for some cool later additions when you're familiar with the basics.
For some reason, when I add flowlines and do the Add points in the properties window the button is greyed out after the first one. The first time I do it, it works just fine. The flowlines work how they're supposed to. If I save, close it out, open it back up, I can then add another set. Do you have any idea why it would be doing that? I downloaded the program about two weeks ago, so it should be up to date.
Hey, Artifexian, would it be possible to add a black hole calculator page to the spreadsheet? I tried making my own calculator for it, but that ended in a habitable zone by luminosity larger than the Milky Way, and that was at just 10 solar masses.
I would love to see how versatile you would be able to make the black holes, and see how they then affect the planets around them.
I SMASHED that LIKE BUTTON
Just so you know hehehe owo😳
I have some doubts about the continental rift features. At some point i wanted to split comoving plates from a certain part, but due to some angle limitations i couldn't and had to split them far from where i originally planed. I want to avoid this issue in the future, so I want to know if i could make new continental rift features, not one each time step but at least one each continental split if necessary.
A couple of suggestions to make your project harder:
Have you thought of putting in an Iceland-like formation above one of those major rifts?
A meteor or a simple anomaly in the crust can explain a chain of islands similar to the Hawaii hotspot.
How are you going to go about deciding is your world in an ice age or not?
If you need more land you can always say that there was a warm climate and cool it down to make some ice sheets and subtract some water from your coasts.
You are doing fantastic work and can't wait to see more of it.
19:43 My flowlines dont look like a triangle in the middle how do I fix it?
I really love this series, but I would really need something similar for a toroidal planet. Any ideas? In fact I think I'll just forget plate tectonics on my half-realistic half-fantasy torus
You want GPlates for a donut?
@@theorixlux Well, "want" might be a strong word but erm yeah it'd be nice
@@davidguerin6142 gplates is scientists' plaything. You won't find a program for a realistic toroidal planet, bc that's an oxymoron.
If you're going realistic: then revisit the drawing board. If you're Sticking with toroidal, then you shouldn't "slightly want" such a finiky program like gplates. :p
@@theorixlux I was asking that half as a joke and half seriously :P I like the diversity of landscapes and inspiration that plate tectonics can give, even though the tectonic regime of a torus is not a scientific question.
@@davidguerin6142 well, I think I see what you're going for. my unqualified opinion would be: a torus body would not affect tectonics differently than a sphere does.
Why? Assuming your celestial body large enough, then a singular point on the surface would see a flat plane. Example: humans look at the horizon and see a mostly flat line, which does not suggest the true shape of the world. Only effects felt on or near the surface affect the surface. Things like subduction? Differences in density.
Proof? Look at earth and the moon. On the scale of the lifetime of a continent, the moon passes by overhead so quickly and often, that it would appear as if the earth had a constant halo of matter around it. This COULD look similar to what a continent on a donut feels. Aside from making mountains on the inner circle steeper and taller, I don't think tectonics will change much.
Hi Artifexian,
thanks for the guides.
I have a question, it would really help, when at the end, you could say what would be reasonable to have happen with out plates.
For example.
Last time you showed your "other" reference continent. But this time you didn't and when we have multiple plates, as we are operating between 8 and 12, how many "breaks" should happen between our comoving clusters?
Is 2 continents to 4, 6, 8, 10 continents reasonable? Is it unreasonable? Or can we just go crazy with what we want?
I think you can pretty much get away with what you want. If you think of Earth since the breakup of Pangaea, there were first two continents, Gondwana in the south (South America, Africa, Australia, and Antarctica) and Laurasia in the north (North America, Europe, and Asia). Then the Atlantic Ocean started to open up, splitting the Americas from the larger continents and leaving them as island continents with intermittent connections to other continents. Eventually, Antarctica and Australia split from Africa, and India split from Africa separately, and then Antarctica and Australia split from each other. And eventually Africa collided with Eurasia, and the Americas reconnected.
That's a bit of a tangent, but the point is, there were a lot of rifting events, and eventually some recombining, so there are a lot of possibilities. You just have to remember that subduction zones are what drive rifting events and they're the main driver of plate motion.
Hey Edgar two quick points. First you said in the last video that you were going to discuss island arcs joining continents (those ones attached to plate 200). And second you also said that Island arcs tend to grow over 50MY. Are you planning on getting into those in the next video at all?
He'll clearly get to those when they naturally come up in this particular simulation. So, probably when the microcontinent goes to collide next time, it might run into that northern island arc and prompt that discussion of "how does it attach, and how big is it now?" Or else in the episode following, if he has nothing else to to show us that should come first, he'll push continent 200 around until that chain runs into another continent. Saying he'll get to it doesn't mean anything about when, just that you can patiently trust that he will.
The subduction zone stuff is only useful if you are not working from a complete map of tectonic plates... The subduction zones would be where these plates run into other ocean crust area of other plates so. Generally i think you should be working with a full map if you're doing this because not doing so introduces a level of unreality you're trying to avoid by doing all this to begin with.
I am hoping when worldbuilding pasta finishes up his plate history, that Artifexian does a little run through/overview of what and why things happened.
"Generally i think you should be working with a full map if you're doing this because not doing so introduces a level of unreality you're trying to avoid by doing all this to begin with."
Disagree with this. First off, I am. Just because the surrounding ocean plates (the grey areas) are underspecified doesn't mean, I'm not thinking about them.
Secondly, the continents will reassemble themselves on the other side of the globe forming the second supercontinent (remember we want to bring the planet through at least two supercontinent cycles). When this occurs we'll have the "full map" you're asking for, which we'll then evolve forward a little bit more to get the modern world.
why do you have to do drift correction everytimes ? Why can't you just do that at the very end when you have done every movement ? Wouldn't it save time ?
You could do that. Though, I suspect you'll end up wanting to corrected it a couple of times along the way. I'm doing a sort of "textbook" tutorial here so an being overly precise.
@@Artifexian oh ok, thanks for the answer !
10:19 why not just…copy the line at the same date for craton C which is right there in the rotation file?
You can - he's doing it the long way. It is worth first double-checking that the co-ordinates *are* identical though.
Yup can do this. I'm just doing "textbook" way.
Hi Edgar, Hi interweb. I wanted to submit a personal question and issue. (Already tried in the last vid but got no answer, let's try again here) Hope I can find at least like-minded souls, if not actual answers and advice. I'm 27, from Italy, and I work on shifts in the customer service field, so not the most creative job. My original passion/profession for voice acting got busted by covid and in the past 2 years I've just been looking for stability, and maybe found it. But I'm realizing that doing this for literally the rest of my life would kill me.
Worldbuilding, drawing fantasy maps and imagining fictional settings and pitches are passions of mine, and I also have a fair basis on realistic topography and ecology due to a year in university (later dropped). I was fantasizing about making a living out of it, and wondered if I could gather any insight on how to do so, apart from opening an instagram page with pics of my maps, posts about settings/worlds I could build, and opening a patreon account... Dunno, I feel that's less likely to happen than a flying donkey (as we say here, lol) Any advice for this desperate soul?
Of course goes without saiyng, I love the channel and the content and the community, and was reason of pride when I got featured in one of the wlrst series
One of the best ways to get someone interested in a world is with a good story. People likely wouldn't be speakign elvish to this day if LOTR and The HObbit weren't published. If you aren't able/willing to write the stories yourself, you could certainly write "pitches" and then hire ghost writers.
I know it's too late to say that but I feel like just enlarging continents would make it easier to relate during world building. Also I think that it would help with placing climate zones later. Nice video anyway.
This is not my world. This is a demo world where I can go over the techniques used in GPlates.
Hi @Artifexian have you got my email?
How liked
Who keeping like me?