GPlates News – Page 2

Kinematic constraints on the Rodinia to Gondwana transition

31 January, 201928 September, 2017 by earthbyte

Author List: Andrew Merdith, Simon Williams, Dietmar Müller & Alan Collins. Citation: Merdith, Andrew & Williams, Simon & Müller, Dietmar & Collins, Alan. (2017). Kinematic constraints on the Rodinia-Gondwana transition. Precambrian Research. 299. . 10.1016/j.precamres.2017.07.013. Abstract: Earth’s plate tectonic history during the breakup of the supercontinent Pangea is well constrained from the seafloor spreading record, but evolving plate configurations during … Read more…

Tectonic speed limits from plate kinematic reconstructions

3 July, 201917 July, 2017 by Sam Russel

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

31 January, 201919 June, 2017 by Ruken

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

26 June, 201716 May, 2017 by Ruken

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

4 February, 201914 April, 2017 by Ruken

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

4 February, 201923 November, 2016 by Carmen Braz

GPlates 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…

GPlates 2.0 software and data sets

9 May, 201921 October, 2016 by Carmen Braz

GPlates 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…

GPlates in Spanish news

15 February, 2016 by Michael Chin

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

4 February, 20196 February, 2016 by Michael Chin

The 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)

GPlates Portal receives a major facelift

1 March, 201814 January, 2016 by Michael Chin

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 course taught at EGU conference in Vienna

6 September, 201513 April, 2015 by kara

Prof Dietmar Müller, Dr Maria Seton and Dr Grace Shephard taught a GPlates course today at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) General Assembly in Vienna. The course was entitled ‘GPlates – make your own plate-tectonic reconstructions’.

GPlates 1.5 software and data sets

17 June, 202116 March, 2015 by Michael Chin

GPlates 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).

Experimental release of GPlates 1.5+Hellinger

4 February, 20196 March, 2015 by Michael Chin

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…

Specialised GPlates course at the ASEG-PESA conference

6 September, 20153 December, 2014 by Michael Chin

19 February 2015, Perth WA – Australia A specialised GPlates course, run by PhD candidates Andrew Merdith and Nicholas Barnett-Moore, will be held at the ASEG-PESA conference in Perth.

New GPlates Portal available

4 February, 201911 October, 2014 by Michael Chin

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…

Solid Earth – Plate tectonic raster reconstruction in GPlates

16 December, 201515 August, 2014 by Michael Chin

Cannon, J., Lau, E., & Müller, R. D. (2014). Plate tectonic raster reconstruction in GPlates. Solid Earth, 5(2), 741-755. doi: 10.5194/sed-5-741-2014. Plate tectonic raster reconstruction in GPlates

GPlates 1.4 now available to download

4 February, 201918 April, 2014 by Michael Chin

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 finalist in The Australian Innovation Challenge 2013

22 October, 201516 November, 2013 by Michael Chin

EarthByte-developed GPlates software, represented by Prof Dietmar Müller, has been nominated for The Australian Innovation Challenge 2013 and it has become a finalist in the minerals and energy category! Read the article published in The Australian here

Plate Tectonic reconstructions in GPlates course

6 September, 20157 November, 2013 by Michael Chin

Intensive GPlates course, run by Dr Nathan Butterworth, held at the Centre for Exploration Targeting, UWA, 7-8 November 2013, number of participants: 15.

GPlates News, out now!

6 September, 201516 October, 2013 by Michael Chin

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 1.3 now available to download

4 February, 201917 May, 2013 by Michael Chin

GPlates 1.3 Released. A major release with new functionality including volume visualisation of 3D scalar fields, data-mining functionality, surface relief lighting and many other enhancements. Download latest version of GPlates

GPlates legacy data and documentation

25 August, 202130 April, 2013 by Michael Chin

*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.

GPlates short course at National Institute of Oceanography, India

6 September, 201519 February, 2013 by Michael Chin

A GPlates short course was held at the National Institute of Oceanography, Dona Paula, Goa, India, from 19-20 February 2013.

Gondwana to Asia 2012 GPlates short course

6 September, 201515 November, 2012 by Michael Chin

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

6 September, 201515 October, 2012 by Michael Chin

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

16 December, 20158 October, 2012 by Michael Chin

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

34th International Geological Congress GPlates workshop

6 September, 20154 August, 2012 by Michael Chin

Date and time: 2012 August 6, evening Venue: Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre (BCEC), Cnr Merivale and Glenelg Streets, South Bank, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia Description: An introductory course to GPlates at the 34th International Geological Congress.

GPlates accepted by Softpedia

6 September, 20151 July, 2011 by Michael Chin

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

16 December, 201515 March, 2011 by Michael Chin

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

GPlates 1.0 now available to download

4 February, 201913 January, 2011 by Michael Chin

GPlates 1.0 has been released! Click here to download the latest version of GPlates