Plate Tectonics Toy
A toy planet with a handful of rigid crustal plates, each drifting in its own direction. Where plates converge, the crust crumples into mountain belts — or, if ocean floor meets continent, dives under it into a deep trench with a line of volcanoes behind. Where plates pull apart, rift valleys drop, flood and widen into young oceans with mid-ocean ridges. Where they slide past each other, transform faults grind. Watch elevation evolve in a hypsometric relief view, toggle overlays for plate boundaries, velocity arrows, boundary types and volcanoes, re-roll the plates, or grab a plate and change its drift direction yourself to see how the geology responds.
Runs 100% in your browser — simulations are computed locally on your device.
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Notes
- The three boundary types — convergent, divergent, transform — are determined purely by the relative velocity of the plates across the boundary; every mountain range, rift and fault in the toy follows from that single classification, just as in plate theory.
- Subduction is decided by buoyancy: oceanic crust is thin, dense basalt, so when it meets thick, light continental crust it always loses and dives — that is why the deepest places on Earth (trenches) sit right next to volcanic mountain chains.
- Real plates move centimeters per year — about as fast as fingernails grow. A million years passes per second here; the Himalayas are what ~50 million years of one such collision look like.
- This is a cartoon of geodynamics, not a mantle convection solver: plate motions are prescribed, not emergent, and elevation changes are heuristic rates tuned to produce recognizable geology.
- Runs 100% in your browser — simulations are computed locally on your device.
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