We present the Indian Ocean plate tectonic model accompanying the study of Gibbons et al., (2012). This work details the first regional-scale tectonic model of the breakup of East Gondwana. Our model shows that the breakup of East Gondwana started with the migration of a continental sliver, Argoland, in the Late Jurassic and was followed by breakup between Greater India and Australia-Antarctica in the Early Cretaceous, involving spreading reconfigurations, which left several sunken continental plateaus of Indian crust on the Australian plate. New evidence from seafloor off northwest Australia also shows that the majority of Greater India reached only about halfway up the West Australian margin, to the Wallaby-Zenith Plateaus.
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Plate tectonic model
The input files are ready for use with GPlates, a free to download, interactive plate-tectonics visualization software program. Please refer to the readme file for instructions or to the tutorials for more information.
If you use any of the resources, please cite the following publication Gibbons, Ana D.; Barckhausen, Udo; van den Bogaard, Paul; Hoernle, Kaj; Werner, Reinhard; Whittaker, Joanne M.; Müller, R. Dietmar (2012), Constraining the Jurassic extent of Greater India: Tectonic evolution of the West Australian margin, Geochemistry Geophysics Geosystems, Vol. 13, (Q05W13) doi:10.1029/2011GC003919.
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