5 September 2016

This directory contains a compilation of present day surface hotspot/plume locations from Whittaker et al. (2015). The plume/hotspot locations are represented as points and are split in Pacific and Indo/Atlantic domains. Locations were compiled from Montelli et al. (2004), Courtillot et al. 2003, Steinberger et al. (2000), and Anderson and Schramm (2005). Plumes closer than 500 km were combined into an averaged location.

Note: The appear age of the hotspots was changed to 200 Ma to represent the uncertain deep time plume eruption locations and ages.

Please use the following citation for this dataset:

Whittaker, J., Afonso, J., Masterton, S., Müller, R., Wessel, P., Williams, S., and Seton, M., 2015, Long-term interaction between mid-ocean ridges and mantle plumes: Nature Geoscience, v. 8, no. 6, p. 479-483, doi:10.1038/ngeo2437.

Two file formats are given:

Hotspots_Compilation_Whittaker_etal.gpmlz - native GPlates Markup Language .gpml compressed format
Hotspots_Compilation_Whittaker_etal.shp - ESRI shapefile .shp format

To load these datasets in GPlates do the following:

1.  Open GPlates
2.  Pull down the GPlates File menu and select the operation Open Feature Collection
3.  Click the file format you want to load
4.  Click Open 

Alternatively, drag and drop the GPMLZ or SHP file onto the globe.

Note: When loading a shapefile, GPlates may prompt you to associate shapefile attributes with GPlates model properties. You just need to click OK. However, if loading your own shapefiles, you may need to ensure that the model properties are mapped correctly.
                   
In order to reconstruct these features, you will need to load in the underlying rotation model (.rot file) which can be found in the GeoData or downloaded from http://www.earthbyte.org/gplates-2-4-software-and-data-sets/.  

Play around with the GPlates buttons to make an animation, select features, draw features, etc.  For more information, read the GPlates manual which can be downloaded from www.gplates.org.

               
Any questions, please email:            
                                        Dietmar Müller dietmar.muller@sydney.edu.au
                                    	Maria Seton maria.seton@sydney.edu.au
                                        Sabin Zahirovic sabin.zahirovic@sydney.edu.au
