Plate tectonic raster reconstruction in GPlates

Abstract

Abstract. We describe a novel method implemented in the GPlates plate tectonic reconstruction software to interactively reconstruct arbitrarily high-resolution raster data to past geological times using a rotation model. The approach is based on the projection of geo-referenced raster data into a cube map followed by a reverse projection onto rotated tectonic plates on the surface of the globe. This decouples the rendering of a geo-referenced raster from its reconstruction, providing a number of benefits including a simple implementation and the ability to combine rasters with different geo-referencing or inbuilt raster projections. The cube map projection is accelerated by graphics hardware in a wide variety of computer systems manufactured over the last decade. Furthermore, by integrating a multi-resolution tile partitioning into the cube map we can provide on-demand tile streaming, level-of-detail rendering and hierarchical visibility culling enabling researchers to visually explore essentially unlimited resolution geophysical raster data attached to tectonic plates and reconstructed through geological time. This capability forms the basis for interactively building and improving plate reconstructions in an iterative fashion, particularly for tectonically complex regions.

A Visual Survey of Global Slab Geometries With ShowEarthModel and Implications for a Three‐Dimensional Subduction Paradigm

“…However, because ShowEarthModel is designed for point cloud data, a volumetric viewing software such as ParaView (Henderson et al, ) or 3DVisualizer (Billen et al, ; Jadamec et al, ) would be needed for viewing and extracting isosurfaces from a gridded data volume for a given seismic tomography data set. Furthermore, although ShowEarthModel allows for viewing the time evolution of earthquake sequences, other open‐source software, such as GPlates (Cannon et al, ; Qin et al, ), would be used to view the time evolution of surface plate motions. Thus, it is up to the user to determine the optimal software or collection of software for a given three‐dimensional problem, and this will require trial and error, writing code to append or modify existing software, and/or generating a new program.…”

Oceanic tectonic islands

“…Spatial analysis and mapping were performed using the open‐source software GMT (General Mapping Tools) (Wessel and Smith, ); 3D images were created using 3DEM (Visualization Software created by Richard Horne, USGS, http://www.hangsim.com/3dem/). The palaeogeographic maps of the Caribbean Sea and of the central Atlantic for the last 50 Ma were created using the open‐source software GPlates (Boyden et al ., ; Williams et al ., ; Cannon et al ., ); palaeobathymetric data are from the online database EarthByte (ftp://ftp.earthbyte.org/earthbyte/agegrid/Palaeo/2008/Data/). Topographic images of tectonic and volcanic oceanic islands were downloaded from Google Earth (see the captions of the figures for their geographical location and correct Google Earth citations).…”

The GPlates Portal: Cloud-Based Interactive 3D Visualization of Global Geophysical and Geological Data in a Web Browser

“…Since geophysical signatures of the oceans and continents contain information about past plate configurations, a natural step is to reconstruct these data using models for past plate configurations, both to validate existing models and explore alternative scenarios. The GPlates desktop software provides functionality to perform high-resolution raster reconstructions [ 26 ]. Different portions of geo-referenced images or gridded geophysical data are assigned to tectonic plates linked to a global rotation model that describes how all major plates have moved relative to each other, and relative to the Earth’s spin axis, since 200 million years ago [ 27 ].…”