GPlates is

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

application software Application may refer to: Mathematics and computing * Application software, computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks ** Application layer, an abstraction layer that specifies protocols and interface methods used in a c ...

offering a novel combination of interactive plate-tectonic reconstructions,

geographic information system A geographic information system (GIS) is a type of database containing Geographic data and information, geographic data (that is, descriptions of phenomena for which location is relevant), combined with Geographic information system software, sof ...

(GIS) functionality and raster data visualization.

History

The GPlates project was started by Professor Dietmar Müller in 2006. By the end of 2010, the GPlates 1.0.0 was released. The latest release is GPlates 2.3 in September 2021. A user manual and tutorials are available online.

Functionality

GPlates enables both the visualization and the manipulation of plate-tectonic reconstructions and associated data through geological time: * Load and save geological, geographic and tectonic feature data. * Assign feature data to tectonic plates. * Reconstruct feature data to past geological times. * Query and edit feature properties and geometries. * Modify reconstructions graphically. * Visualize vector and raster data on the globe or in one of the map projections. * Visualize sub-surface 3D scalar fields as isosurfaces or 2D cross-sections. * Export reconstructed data as a time-sequence of exported files. * Use plate polygons (with dynamic boundaries and deformation) to calculate velocity fields.

Contributors

GPlates is developed by an international team of scientists and professional software developers at: * the EarthByte group in the school of Geosciences at the

University of Sydney The University of Sydney (USYD), also known as Sydney University, or informally Sydney Uni, is a public research university located in Sydney, Australia. Founded in 1850, it is the oldest university in Australia and is one of the country's si ...

* the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences (GPS) at Caltech with past contributions from: * the Centre for Earth Evolution and Dynamics (CEED) at the Department of Geosciences, University of Oslo, Norway * the Geodynamics Team at the Geological Survey of Norway (NGU)

Adoption

GPlates is used by geophysicists, students and researchers in academic institutions, government departments and industry. It has also gained currency in the creative

worldbuilding Worldbuilding is the process of constructing a world, originally an imaginary one, sometimes associated with a fictional universe. Developing an imaginary setting with coherent qualities such as a history, geography, and ecology is a key task fo ...

community as a tool for maintaining realism or

verisimilitude In philosophy, verisimilitude (or truthlikeness) is the notion that some propositions are closer to being true than other propositions. The problem of verisimilitude is the problem of articulating what it takes for one false theory to be closer ...

in geographic features. In 2019, two Australian researchers used the software to create a tectonic map of the continents within the fictional ''

Game of Thrones ''Game of Thrones'' is an American fantasy drama television series created by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss for HBO. It is an adaptation of ''A Song of Ice and Fire'', a series of fantasy novels by George R. R. Martin, the first ...

'' universe.

Implementation

GPlates runs on

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. Within the market of ...

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

and

Ubuntu Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed mostly of free and open-source software. Ubuntu is officially released in three editions: ''Desktop'', ''Server'', and ''Core'' for Internet of things devices and robots. All the ...

. GPlates is written in

C++ C++ (pronounced "C plus plus") is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The language has expanded significan ...

and uses

OpenGL OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D vector graphics. The API is typically used to interact with a graphics processing unit (GPU), to achieve hardwa ...

to render its 3D globe and 2D

map A map is a symbolic depiction emphasizing relationships between elements of some space, such as objects, regions, or themes. Many maps are static, fixed to paper or some other durable medium, while others are dynamic or interactive. Although ...

views. It uses Qt as a GUI framework. The Boost C++ library has also been widely used. Other libraries include

GDAL The Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL) is a computer software library for reading and writing raster and vector geospatial data formats (e.g. shapefile), and is released under the permissive X/MIT style free software license by the Open ...

CGAL The Computational Geometry Algorithms Library (CGAL) is an open source software library of computational geometry algorithms. While primarily written in C++, Scilab bindings and bindings generated with SWIG (supporting Python and Java for now) ar ...

proj PROJ (formerly PROJ.4) is a library for performing conversions between cartographic projections. The library is based on the work of Gerald Evenden at the United States Geological Survey (USGS), but since 2019-11-26 is an Open Source Geospatial F ...

qwt Qwt or Qt Widgets for Technical Applications is a set of custom Qt widgets, GUI Components and utility classes which are primarily useful for programs with a technical background. Beside a 2D plot widget it provides scales, sliders, dials, compa ...

and GLEW.

Information Model

GPGIM and GPML

GPlates uses th
GPlates Geological Information Model
(GPGIM) to represent geological data in a

Plate tectonics Plate tectonics (from the la, label=Late Latin, tectonicus, from the grc, τεκτονικός, lit=pertaining to building) is the generally accepted scientific theory that considers the Earth's lithosphere to comprise a number of large ...

context. Th
GPlates Markup Language
(GPML) is an XML implementation of the GPGIM derived from the

Geography Markup Language The Geography Markup Language (GML) is the XML grammar defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to express geographical features. GML serves as a modeling language for geographic systems as well as an open interchange format for geographic ...

(GML).

GPlates Python Binding

The GPlates Python library (pyGPlates) enables access to GPlates functionality via the Python programming language. It allows users to use GPlates in a programmatic way and hence provides much more flexibility than the GPlates desktop interface can offer. The pyGPlates is available fo
download
Reference documentation and tutorials are also available fo

The PyGPlates beta revision 28 was released on 8 August 2020. This is the first version which supports Python3.

People

Developers

*John Cannon (active) EarthByte group, The University of Sydney : John is the lead developer of GPlates. *Michael Chin(Xiaodong Qin) (active) EarthByte group, The University of Sydney *Robin Watson (inactive) Geodynamics team, Geological Survey of Norway *Mark Turner (inactive) *Enoch Lau (inactive) *James Clark (inactive) *James Boyden (inactive) *Hamish Ivey-Law (inactive)

Scientists

*Professor

Dietmar Müller Dietmar Müller is a professor of geophysics at the school of geosciences, the University of Sydney. Early life and education Müller received his undergraduate degree from the Christian-Albrechts University of Kiel in Germany, followed by ...

:Dietmar is the founder and current lead of the GPlates project. *Professor Mike Gurnis :Also a founder of the GPlates project. *Dr.

Maria Seton Maria Seton (''nee'' Sdrolias) is an Australian geologist in the Faculty of Science EarthByte Group School of Geosciences at the University of Sydney. Seton's research is in the field of geophysics and geodynamics. Her main focus is the link ...

*Dr. Simon Williams

Licensing

GPlates is released under GNU General Public License version 2.0 (GPLv2) and the source code can be found on

SourceForge SourceForge is a web service that offers software consumers a centralized online location to control and manage open-source software projects and research business software. It provides source code repository hosting, bug tracking, mirrorin ...

GPlates Portal

The GPlates Web Portal is a gateway to a series of GPlates-based web applications. The portal was launched in 2014
Michael Chin
is the architect and chief programmer. Initially the portal was hosted o
nectar cloud
Later on, it was migrated to

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a part of Amazon.com's cloud-computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), that allows users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications. EC2 encourages scalable deployment of ...

. Below is a list of applications in GPlates Web Portal. *Vertical Gravity Gradient :3D visualization of the Vertical Gravity Gradient Grid. *Raster Reconstruction :Reconstruct raster images through time. *Paleomap Maker :Data reconstruction and visualization service. *Dynamic Topography *IPython Sandbox :Demonstrate how to use pyGPlates in

IPython IPython (Interactive Python) is a command shell for interactive computing in multiple programming languages, originally developed for the Python programming language, that offers introspection, rich media, shell syntax, tab completion, and histo ...

Notebook. *Magnetic Picks *SRTM15_PLUS Topography *Seafloor Lithology The Cesium Javascript library is used to render the 3D globe in a web browser.

Media

*CNN (This map lets you see where your hometown was on the Earth millions of years ago) *The Guardian (The most detailed map of the ocean floor ever seen) *wired.com (Super-Detailed Interactive 3-D Seafloor Map) *Industry Advocate (Seafloor Mapping first) *Orma (Earth Without Oceans- Stunning New Interactive Map of the Earth's Seafloor)

Select Publications

Below is a list of select publications of GPlates. *Plate tectonic raster reconstruction in GPlates *Next-generation plate-tectonic reconstructions using GPlates *The GPlates Geological Information Model and Markup Language *An open-source software environment for visualizing and refining plate tectonic reconstructions using high-resolution geological and geophysical data sets *Plate Reconstructions with Continuously Closing Plates *Visualizing 3D mantle structure from seismic tomography and geodynamic model predictions of the India-Eurasia and East Asia convergence zone *Application of open-source software and high-resolution geophysical images to explore the plate tectonic evolution of Australia *A Custom Implementation for Visualizing Sub-surface 3D Scalar Fields in GPlates *The GPlates Portal: Cloud-based interactive 3D visualization of global geophysical and geological data in a web browser

Funding

Australian Laureate FellowshipAuScopeScience and Industry Endowment Fund (SIEF)

References

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External links

GPlates Tutorials

EarthByte

GPlates Portal
Cross-platform free software Qt (software) OpenGL Plate tectonics