Making Our Continents

We’ve reached a point where it’s hard to look at the planet as a whole, and we have enough background information to proceed. While each continent’s geography is part of the overall planet structure (especially where plate tectonics gets involved), the continents are also separate entities that have their own geographical, geological, weather, and other issues. This gets even more interesting when we start dealing with living things!

A closer look

Let’s start by getting a detailed look at the continents. There are a number of ways we can determine their shape. If you want your world to have more of a “created as it is” feel then you might simply go through and draw up the continents however you like. You might even give them shapes that signify symbols, animals, or otherwise. I’m going to go with the super continent breaking apart issues that I discussed in When Plates Collide. This doesn’t preclude having a planet that was created by a deity. In my opinion, any entity that can create a planet can also create the forces that shape it over time.

Rather than having the initial land mass being one continent as in Earth’s Pangea, I’ll start us with the 2 continents shown here. (Click here to get a larger version.) Over the millennia, these 2 fragmented into 6. The dark lines represent the landmasses and the faint lines represent the plates beneath them. So, how does this break apart? Remember from our discussions in When Plates Collide that what happens to the surface of the world depends on how each plate moves.

Why are we going through all of this? Of course, not everyone reading my topic needs to be quite this detailed. However, I noticed I was doing something bad with the novel I’m working on. I was almost haphazardly deciding what countries had what scenery. Suddenly, I had someone traveling from one country to another and was having to consider what they’d see and experience along the way. I realized I don’t have a very solid image of what my world is actually like. Since I’d like to use my own fictional world for a variety of projects, it behooves me to make sure it fits together well. If you’re like me in this respect then this exercise will benefit you immensely.

Pulling the continents apart

Don’t worry, I’m not going to get into a bunch of math here. I started with a more detailed writeup and realized that I was getting a bit too technical. However, I’ve saved that information, so if anyone wants to see it please ask in the Discussion forum and I’ll put it up as a second part of this article.

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