GPlates: FREE SOFTWARE FOR LINKING OBSERVATIONS TO PLATE KINEMATIC AND DYNAMIC EARTH MODELS

GPlates (www.gplates.org) is free desktop software running on Windows, Linux and MacOS X. It enables the interactive manipulation of plate-tectonic reconstructions and the visualization of geodata through geological time. Users can build regional or global plate models, import their own data and digitise features. GPlates can handle paleomagnetic data, create and display virtual paleomagnetic poles, and derive absolute plate rotations from them, and an ability to handle plate deformation is also being implemented. This functionality enables researchers to address controversies in paleogeography, plate tectonics and deep earth evolution. GPlates allows users to interactively investigate alternative fits of the continents, to test hypotheses of supercontinent formation and breakup through time and to unravel the evolution of tectonically complex areas such as the Tethys, the Caribbean and Southeast Asia. Raster files images in a variety of formats can be loaded, assigned to tectonic plates, age-coded and reconstructed through geological time. The software also allows the exporting of image sequences for animations or for publication-quality figure generation as vector graphics files. Plates and plate boundaries through time can be visualised over mantle tomography image stacks. GPlates is also designed to enable the linking of plate tectonic models with mantle convection models. The software allows the construction of time-dependent plate boundary topologies as well as exporting plate polygons and velocity time-sequences. Mantle convection model output images can be imported and animated with plate tectonic reconstructions overlain. GPlates is interoperable with ArcGIS, i.e. it can read and write shapefiles and reconstructed GPlates data can be exported to be plotted with the open-source Generic Mapping Tools. GPlates can further be used for multidimensional spatio-temporal data analysis via a link to the open-source data mining software Orange. GPlates represents the starting point for an integrated understanding of Earth processes in four dimensions. With an open-source platform, anyone from academia, government, industry, or the public can now harness the power of paleogeographic reconstructions.