Plate Tectonics

Ideas about how a world with more than three spatial dimensions would work - what laws of physics would be needed, how things would be built, how people would do things and so on.

Plate Tectonics

Postby anderscolingustafson » Thu Mar 13, 2014 4:30 pm

How would Plate Tectonics work in 4d? Would there still be separate tectonic plates or would there be a single tectonic plate covering an entire planet? Would there be fault planes between tectonic plates or would there just be cracks in a tectonic plate?
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Re: Plate Tectonics

Postby ICN5D » Fri Mar 14, 2014 4:23 am

Hmm, interesting, well, I suppose that a fault line in 4D would actually be a 3D chasm, between two 4D solid masses sliding past each other. It still could have tilings of tectonic plates, but at the subduction zones, the 4D mass moves ana/kata, away from the chasm. I also suppose that each 4D plate would be bounded by these 3D contact patch chasms.
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Re: Plate Tectonics

Postby wendy » Fri Mar 14, 2014 7:35 am

Plate tectonics in 4d would consist of plates etc, but the fault lines would now be hedrous (ie 2d shaped). As with 3d, there is no reason for the faults to be either singular or connected. A fault is like a fence: it's a division of the surface, and therefore is of dimension S-1. Since here S is driven by gravity, and is N-1, the fault is in 4D, a hedrous form, and the plates, being as faces of a polytope, a chorous form.

Rift faults can still form, but rifts are also a hedrous affair. You would either travel a long way or build a crossing to get across a rift in any space.
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Re: Plate Tectonics

Postby Teragon » Sun Nov 08, 2015 4:50 pm

Transform faults would make up a higher percentage of all faults and they would form a closed band around tectonic plates. Mountain ranges would be extensive in two dimensions instead of just one. You could walk around valleys on the mountains as they would still be extensive in only 1 dimension. Seismic waves would decrease faster with the distance of the epicentrum and therefore be less destructive.
What is deep in our world is superficial in higher dimensions.
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