Opensource Geological Tools: Plate reconstruction

In terms of outreach and education there are some great open-source visualisations, data and tools for earth sciences. Earthviewer allows people to explore Earth’s history in deep time, from 4.5 billion years ago to present day. This includes the location of major cities and where they were at various points of geological time to help orientation. The visualisation also includes how atmospheric composition, temperature, biodiversity, day length, and solar luminosity have changed over geologic time.

Earthviewer is from BioInteractive, a part of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), a provider of free classroom resources for teachers, and professional development for high school and undergraduate biology educators.

More sophisticated open-source tools exist such as GPlates funded by AuScope (Australia). This offers interactive plate tectonic reconstructions and raster data visualisations through geological time.

The GPlates portal is a wonderful collection of open-access global datasets. Including seafloor lithology, gravity, magnetics, topography, rodinia reconstruction, extinct ridges, rift velocity, polymetallic nodules, biosphere, palaeoDEM, abyssal hills, crustal thickness etc.

In the suite of tools GPlately is a Python package which enables the reconstruction of data through deep geological time (points, lines, polygons, and rasters). It allows examination of “plate kinematic information (plate velocities, rates of subduction and seafloor spreading), the rapid comparison between multiple plate motion models, and the plotting of reconstructed output data on maps.”

GPlates development is by the EarthByte Project, part of the AuScope infrastructure-development programme. AuScope Ltd is a non-profit company formed to facilitate the implementation of a world-class infrastructure system for earth science, funded by the Australian Government under the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS).

Earthviewer: https://www.biointeractive.org/classroom-resources/earthviewer
GPlates: https://www.gplates.org/
GPlates portal (Data_: https://portal.gplates.org/#apps-anchor