The Highs And The Lows
The age of our planet determines many things. One thing that partially comes from the age is how high its mountains go and how low its trenches are. Our planet is the same age as Earth, 225 million years. Therefore, it’s had the same amount of time to move around and shake its surface up. Let’s say that our planet has 6 continents. As I discussed in the plate tectonics article, where the highs and lows are depends on not only where the continents sit, but plate edge locations.
Notice the orange lines that run right through the continents on the image. These represent the plate boundaries underneath the surface. Here is where we can get some interesting geography. Since we’re just focusing now on the overall layout of the water, what we want to consider here is how these plates are moving relative to one another. In an area where they’re pushing in against each other, the surface is going to rise, so we won’t find water there except in isolated lakes. If they’re pulling apart and have been doing so for a while, then the surface is going to drop or build up into volcanoes. The third option, two plates sliding against one another, brings cause earthquakes and other fun shakeups. Once again, if this has been going on for a while, there may have been some surface drop.
Where there’s low ground, there will be water. Anywhere where there’s a surface drop you might get rivers, lakes, seas, or even as we see with Pangea we might see the beginnings of what will be a new ocean in a few million years. But for now, maybe the area is just known for choppy seas and odd occurrences because of common underground earthquakes.
