GPlates

GPlates -- Paleogeographic Modelling Tools

The Geodynamics group is one of the development sites for GPlates, an international consortium, developing a modern paleogeographic (plate tectonic) modeling package. The principal node is the Insitute of Marine Science, Sydney University in Australia. GPlates provides interactive plate tectonic reconstructions. It is designed to enable students of earth sciences to manipulate plates on the surface of the globe and create reconstructions of likely plate positions in the past. It will also provide researchers in the earth sciences field with a powerful tool to combine various types of data, such as point, line and gridded data, and simulate the changes in this data over time.

The Caltech group is working on making GPlates compatible with geodynamics simulation software as well as the GeoFramework system.