GPlates News

Tectonic speed limits from plate kinematic reconstructions

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Abstract The motion of plates and continents on the planet’s surface are a manifestation of long-term mantle convection and plate tectonics. Present-day plate velocities provide a snapshot of this ongoing process, and have been used to infer controlling factors on the speeds of plates and continents. However, present-day velocities do not capture plate behaviour over … Read more…

Rodinia conference in Townsville reviews progress and challenges in reconstructing ancient supercontinents

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Several EarthByters presented talks at the Rodinia 2017 conference in Townsville, including Dietmar Müller, Andrew Merdith, Simon Williams, Mike Tetley and Nicolas Flament.  The conference was opened by two talks by Alan Collins (Univ. Adelaide) and Andrew, presenting their new Proterozoic Rodinia plate model with continuously closing plate boundaries that were recently published in Gondwana … Read more…

Colombia GPlates Course

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During the second week of May, Earthbyte Alumnus Nicholas Barnett-Moore visited a research group at the National University of Colombia, Medellín, under the coordination of Assistant Professor Agustin Cardona and Associate Professor Gaspar Monsalve to teach a one-week intensive course on the plate reconstruction software, GPlates. The primary research interests of this group were focused … Read more…

A full-plate global reconstruction of the Neoproterozoic

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Author List:  Andrew Merdith, Alan Collins, Simon Williams, Sergei Pisarevsky, John Foden, Donnelly Archibald, Morgan Blades, Brandon Alessio, Sheree Armistead, Diana Plavsa, Chris Clark, Dietmar Müller Citation: Merdith, Andrew & Collins, Alan & Williams, Simon & Pisarevsky, Sergei & Foden, John & Archibald, Donnelly & Blades, Morgan & Alessio, Brandon & Armistead, Sheree & Plavsa, Diana & Clark, Chris … Read more…

GPlates 2.0 Released

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2016_11_MedMeet-Group.jpgGPlates 2.0 was released last week, with lots of new features including plate deformation, volume rendering, much improved project and session management, a plate topology building tool and an interactive tool to determine best-fit rotation poles using the method of Hellinger, and much more. Check out the full list of improvements here. … Read more…

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GPlates 2.0 software and data sets

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GPlates 1.5 PromoGPlates is a free desktop software for the interactive visualisation of plate-tectonics. The compilation and documentation of GPlates 2.0 data was primarily funded by AuScope National Collaborative Research Infrastructure (NCRIS).

GPlates is developed by an international team of scientists and professional software developers at the EarthByte Project (part of AuScope) at the University of Sydney, the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences (GPS) at CalTech, the Geodynamics team at the Geological Survey of Norway (NGU) and the Centre for Earth Evolution and Dynamics (CEED) at the University of Oslo.  … Read more…

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GPlates in Spanish news

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The link below points to an article written about EarthByte and GPlates by a Spanish journalist. The article is titled: “Viaje en una máquina del tiempo virtual a la Tierra de hace 1.000 millones de años: … which translates into: Travel in a virtual time machine to Earth 1,000 million years ago. http://m.eldiario.es/hojaderouter/ciencia/gplates-pangea-geologia-historia-Tierra-big_data_0_482951817.html Buenos dias todos … Read more…

pygplates beta revision 12 released

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GPlates Vector Logo

GPlates Vector LogoThe first beta release of pygplates (the GPlates Python library) is now available for download.

pygplates enables access to GPlates functionality via the Python programming language. This may be of particular use to researchers requiring more flexibility than is provided by the GPlates user interface.

The following pygplates functionality is available:-

  • Load and save feature data (GPML, Shapefile, etc)
  • Create/modify/query feature data
  • Traverse/modify/query plate rotation hierarchy
  • Partition into plates and assign plate properties
  • Reconstruct geometries, flowlines, motion paths
  • Resolve topological plates and query their boundary sections (ridges/subductions)
  • Calculate velocities
  • Distance between geometries (region-of-interest queries)
  • Geometry queries (length, point-in-polygon, area, centroid, tessellate, interpolate, join, partition)

… Read more…

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GPlates Portal receives a major facelift

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GPlates Vector Logo

The GPlates Portal has received a major facelift, using state-of-the-art web design. The primary design principle of the new front page is to convey the most important information to users in an effective way. The new grid layout guarantees the presentation of information is always in a user readable format on the screen of any … Read more…

GPlates 1.5 software and data sets

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GPlates 1.5 Promo

GPlates 1.5 PromoGPlates is a free desktop software for the interactive visualisation of plate-tectonics. The compilation and documentation of GPlates 1.5 data was primarily funded by AuScope National Collaborative Research Infrastructure (NCRIS).

GPlates is developed by an international team of scientists and professional software developers at the EarthByte Project (part of AuScope) at the University of Sydney, the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences (GPS) at CalTech, the Geodynamics team at the Geological Survey of Norway (NGU) and the Centre for Earth Evolution and Dynamics (CEED) at the University of Oslo.  … Read more…

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Experimental release of GPlates 1.5+Hellinger

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GPlates 1.5 Promo

An experimental release of GPlates 1.5+Hellinger was released this week. This version includes all GPlates 1.5 functionality as well as a Hellinger Tool to calculate best-fitting poles to segmented magnetic pick data points. The tool uses a Python implementation of the FORTRAN program by Chang and others and is compatible with FORTRAN data files which can … Read more…

New GPlates Portal available

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GPlates Portal Figure

EarthByte have launched a new cloud-based GPlates Web Portal that was used by almost 40 000 users over the last long-weekend! It took GPlates software over ten years to get that many users, so this is a huge achievement and also makes GPlates accessible to a broader audience! The GPlates portal can be used to … Read more…

GPlates 1.4 now available to download

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GPlates Version 1.4 has been released! This latest update of GPlates brings added functionality for the export of both numerical floating point-data and colour reconstructed rasters, for a user specified region and resolution. There is also greater flexibility for raster file import, with ERMapper, Erdas Imagine and GeoTIFF files now supported and geo-referencing is retained … Read more…

GPlates News, out now!

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GPlates News, a new email update on recently added GPlates functionality, new tutorials, and GPlates related research and downloadable datasets has been launched. View GPlates News here

GPlates legacy data and documentation

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GPlates legacy image*Superceded (older) tutorials for earlier GPlates versions can still be accessed here

GPlates-compatible Data Files – Features
Below is a list of GPlates-compatible data files that can be loaded seamlessly in GPlates. The feature data are available as .gpml (GPlates Markup Language), .dat (PLATES4), .shp (ESRI Shapefile) and .xy (long, lat with header record) formats.

Data by the EarthByte Group are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. When using GPlates and the sample data to make figures for publications, we recommend citing the original data sources as indicated below.

For users of GPlates 1.5, you can find the complete archived Sample Data from this link.

… Read more…

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Gondwana to Asia 2012 GPlates short course

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Date and time: 2012 November 21, 9am-1pm Venue: Mawson Building, School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia Description: An introductory course to GPlates at the International Association for Gondwana Research Annual Convention and 9th International Symposium on Gondwana to Asia.

Michael Chin wins NeCTAR/ANDS #nadojo competition for GPlates

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Congratulations to Michael Chin from the Earthbyte group on winning this year’s NeCTAR/ANDS #nadojo competition. Michael demonstrated a new web-enabled GPlates prototype on the NECTAR/ANDS eResearch computing infrastructure, porting some of the powerful plate reconstruction capabilities to the web. The new GPlates competed with several other candidates from universities and research institutes in Australia, and … Read more…

Geoscientific Instrumentation Methods and Data Systems – The GPlates geological information model and markup language

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Qin, X., Müller, R. D., Cannon, J., Landgrebe, T. C. W., Heine, C., Watson, R. J., & Turner, M. (2012). The GPlates geological information model and markup language. Geosci. Instrum. Methods Data Syst. Discuss, 2, 365-428. doi:10.5194/gi-1-111-2012. Download the paper – pdf

GPlates accepted by Softpedia

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GPlates has been accepted by Softpedia which is a popular library of over 400,000 free and free-to-try software programs and is one of the top 500 websites (according to Alexa traffic rankings). Since GPlates’ acceptance yesterday (30th June) it has already been downloaded over 1,000 times according to Softpedia. This is significant considering that the … Read more…

Cambridge University Press – Next-generation plate-tectonic reconstructions using GPlates

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Boyden, J., Müller, R. D., Gurnis, M., Torsvik, T. H., Clark, J. A., Turner, M., … & Cannon, J. S. (2011). Next-generation plate-tectonic reconstructions using GPlates. Geoinformatics: Cyberinfrastructure for the Solid Earth Sciences. Keller, G. R., & Baru, C. (Eds.). (2011). Geoinformatics: cyberinfrastructure for the solid Earth sciences. Cambridge University Press. Download the paper – pdf