golem wrote:
I'm creating a conworld, and I want it to be scientifically accurate, so I'm going to include tectonic plate boundaries and movements of the plates in my creation. However, I'm also going to create a conworld with very little land, or at least less amount of it than in case of our Earth. I know, that having huge amounts of water is probably a condition for having plate tectonics by planets with size of Earth, and worlds without oceans could have plates only if they were bigger. However, I don't know, how would a plate tectonics look on a planet that I'd like to create: would it be significally differenet with respect to sizes of plates, their movements, distribution, etc? Or maybe plate tectonics would be impossible?
How about other features of such a planet: would it be possible to keep little area of land surface without risking it's erosion and dissapearance in relatively short time (perhaps shorter, than one required for evolution of land life)? And for average ocean depth: would it be greater, or smaller? I think, that for keeping small aea of land it would be required to have deeper oceans, so as water could cover more area of continents... however, that probably could cause quicker errosion of remaining land... or am I wrong?
Thank you in advance, for all answers!
I don't know the answers to many of these question, but I will point out that the land areas would have to be very, very small to fear rapid erosion of the kind you're implying, so I think you'll be safe there. Also note that tectonic activity means some plates will crash into eachother at some point, creating new land when they buckle and form mountains. You'd also have volcanoes.
I would speculate that for an Earth sized planet, you would indeed need deeper oceans but I also suspect that this will do little to affect the plates' movements.
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I speak English and a touch of Gàidhlig.
I am creating a conworld, which I refer to as the
Carrion Series, that will contain three languages,
Iriex,
Dvoen and Maxna.