21 May 2018

This directory contains the Palaeogeographic Atlas of Australia created by Geoscience Australia, and converted into shapefiles for use in GPlates by the EarthByte group. 

Note: Although we have endeavoured to remove any artefacts, the file conversion process and the rendering of (donut) polygons in GPlates may cause differences with respect to the original. Please e-mail us if you find any problems with this dataset. 

Please use the following citation for this dataset:

Totterdell, J.M., Cook, P.J., Bradshaw, M.T., Wilford, G.E., Yeates, A.N., Yeung, M., Truswell, E.M., Brakel, A.T., Isem, A.R., Olissoff, S., Strusz, D.L., Langford, R.P., Walley, A.M., Mulholland, S.M., Beynon, R.M., 2001, Palaeogeographic Atlas of Australia: Geoscience Australia.

The original Palaeogeographic Atlas of Australia can be downloaded from:
https://ecat.ga.gov.au/geonetwork/srv/eng/catalog.search?node=srv#/metadata/a05f7892-b531-7506-e044-00144fdd4fa6 

You can visualise the maps on this page:
http://www.ga.gov.au/static/palaeo/palaeo.html


Four file formats are given:

GeoscienceAustralia_Paleogeographic_Atlas.gproj - GPlates project .gproj file 
PaleogeographicAtlas_GA_GTS04_V8.shp - ESRI shapefile .shp format
GA_Paleogeography.cpt - GMT- and GPlates-compatible Colour Palette (CPT) file

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 SHP Shapefile to load
4.  Click Open 

Alternatively, open the GPROJ file using the File > Open Project menu, which will also load the relevant rotation file, present-day reconstructed coastline, and colour palette file. 
                   
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
                                        Sabin Zahirovic sabin.zahirovic@sydney.edu.au
                                        Maria Seton maria.seton@sydney.edu.au
	