Now that we’ve got our world straightened out physics-wise, let’s continue westward and flesh out more of our land areas. This time we’ll focus on the two island groups near the continents we’ve already set up; one to the southwest and another directly to the west. When I look at these two island chains, I think ring of fire. That’s one direction I can take here because both sets of islands (it may or may not be clear in the images) are top portions of underground mountain chains. Setting up a ring of fire creates a series of volcanic islands constantly building onto themselves. Another available direction would be the pure pushing up of rock as continents collide.
Since I’ve gone through many of the teensy initial steps, I can look back through my world-building images and articles and see that both of the island chains are indeed on plate borders. They’re not on the same plate or grouping of plates, however. This lets me choose to do one set of islands as volcanic and the others as non-volcanic. Now, if I hadn’t gone through all of the nitpicky stuff earlier on and was just eyeballing things, I might have decided to make a single ring of fire out of these and some other points. As I’ve said before, you don’t have to go through every single step that I’ve detailed. Pick and choose what makes sense for your particular needs.
The SouthWestern Islands
Let’s make this set of islands non-volcanic. This means that aside from the occasional earthquake as the mountains get pushed up a bit more (and eventually more land mass pops up out of the water), they’re really not that bad a place to live.
There’s a set of winds coming in from the northeast already, but they’ll never reach these islands. They’re actually blocked off by the mountains to the northeast if you look really closely. (Keep in mind that all this discussion of winds really centers on major wind patterns. There are of course lots of smaller things going on at any given time. But that’s something we’ll get into once we start zooming in on each continent and island.)
In fact, I won’t assign any major wind front to this tiny island set. Let’s allow it to be a nice tranquil place aside from those pesky earthquakes. The weather here won’t be terribly dramatic unless a storm sweeps through, and storms will visit because of the wide expanses of water around it. In some ways these islands are similar to the Caribbean--specifically in the fact that they’re just the tips of underwater mountains. While we often think of winter beach resort destinations as being directly on the equator, our islands are in fact about as far from this midpoint as the Caribbean is.
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