Continental breakup frequency

[redferret]

Would it be possible to implement a feature to be able change the frequency of the super continent break up?

[TheNewParad1gm]

I notice as well that continent breakup seems to remove the previous plates and create new ones. Is it possible to have plates divide and others fuse over time, rather than one wholesale change?

[redferret]

I played around with the break up and triggered the breakup very often and it doesn't always create whole new plates, try it. Trigger the breakup every 1-5 million years and watch the plates... it won't 'wholesale change'. It's just a thought.

[davidson16807]

I consider this related to issue #1, which has (obviously) been a long standing issue.

I very much wish I could write a new model from scratch in such a way that plate boundaries get generated dynamically, none of this having to split them all at once periodically.

I thought about doing a crude viscous fluid simulation but historically it hasn't been enough for people to reproduce plate motion. The plates actually do resemble rigid bodies in most places except for where there's more than two plates involved. The other alternative I considered is a mass-spring system where forces get set to zero when strain exceeds a threshold. One complication there is that we're dealing with creeping flow, so whatever model we choose would ideally have to run several iterations per frame to find a plate velocity where net forces are at or near zero.

[TheNewParad1gm]

I subsequently did notice that if I did a number of plate breakups in quick succession it created pretty much the same plates, so realised it must be based on underlying data.

I now turn off the breakup so I can manually control it if I thought it had got too "stagnant". I actually found the frequency too often, as it could take a while for landmasses to have collided, and they weren't doing so for that long before a new breakup occurred.

I wonder if an alternative would be to fuse plates if they have been pushing together for a certain length of time and, instead of randomly regenerating plates, just, at maybe shorter intervals, check for the most significant places it might occur (presumably this is done to see where the new plates would be formed when using breakup) and add one or two new splits to the current ones rather than remove them all and generating new ones.

Would that necessarily require new information to be present in the model?