Feature request: hot spots and plate rifting

[ftlbiped]

Right now there don't appear to be any mantle plumes or hots spots in the simulated tectonics. Hot spots:

• create oceanic island chains, a very recognizable feature of earth's surface, and may create other landmasses (e.g. iceland, where a hotspot is on a rift zone)
• drive volcanic activity, which contributes to geology in various ways (I know someone else was asking about mineral composition)
• induce or contribute to tectonic plate breakup (e.g., african great rift valley, which is driven by two hot spots iirc)

The last one is especially important. I don't think a hot spot alone is always necessary to form a rift, nor does its presence under a plate guarantee one. The extensional forces on the plate tearing it apart play a big (maybe even bigger?) role. And the thickness/density of the plate also influences whether a hot spot can initiate rifting. But fortunately you already simulate those other two features! And there is a characteristic geography that forms when a rift involves a hotspot: three rift arms spread out from the hotspot, two meet plate boundaries and divide the plate and the third becomes a failed rift arm.

Failed rifting events are also important, though I can't tell if you're already simulating those. But they create a lot of interesting geography, especially large inland lakes or seas (the great lakes, lake baikal, the mediterranian/black seas, the baltic sea and gulf of bothnia. I don't know the degree to which hotspots were involved in all of them, but they're all failed rifts!

[davidson16807]

iirc there's an implementation for hotspots somewhere in the code base for pytectonics. Hotspots are still on to the todo... for the c++ port. If anyone's willing to take up the implementation for the javascript, then can I offer recommendations for how best I think they can be implemented.

Not sure what's meant by plate rifting, since we do represent that. The elevation of rifts to my understanding is driven by how the density of crust changes with age, which causes a different isostatic elevation. That's what we represent in code.

induce or contribute to tectonic plate breakup (e.g., african great rift valley, which is driven by two hot spots iirc)

citation? We're currently using [Schellart 2010] as a basis for how to model crust motion, which I think is extremely sensible and has allowed the model to account for spatial patterns in ocean crust age that no prior model has been able for.

[Mlvluu]

iirc there's an implementation for hotspots somewhere in the code base for pytectonics. Hotspots are still on to the todo... for the c++ port. If anyone's willing to take up the implementation for the javascript, then can I offer recommendations for how best I think they can be implemented.

Not sure what's meant by plate rifting, since we do represent that. The elevation of rifts to my understanding is driven by how the density of crust changes with age, which causes a different isostatic elevation. That's what we represent in code.

induce or contribute to tectonic plate breakup (e.g., african great rift valley, which is driven by two hot spots iirc)

citation? We're currently using [Schellart 2010] as a basis for how to model crust motion, which I think is extremely sensible and has allowed the model to account for spatial patterns in ocean crust age that no prior model has been able for.

The rifting in the simulation seems to be a replacement of plates with a completely new, unrelated plate configuration.