Age of subducting oceanic lithosphere at trench

Q&A
1

Hi,
I’d like to extract the age of the subducting oceanic lithosphere from a model (e.g., from the files of Seton et al., 2012) along the trench. I’m specifically interested in the age of subducting oceanic lithosphere at the trench of plate 201 from 70 - 0Ma.
I’m think this is something that can be done with Plate tectonic tools, however I am a newbie and can’t get it to work! Any assistance would be appreciated!

Thanks,
Alex

2

Hi Alex,

I’m not sure if this suggestion is exactly what you require but you should be able to do this in a GIS program if you have a polyline feature class for the subduction zones and a raster of the age of the oceanic crust. There is an example here (although I have not tried it myself).

All the best,

Alan

3

There’s also this notebook in PlateTectonicTools that samples rasters along trenches through time.