Can GPlates be used to model probable/hypothetical future tectonic development?
Are there examples of where this has been done? If such projects are available, I’d be most interested to view them
This thread might be of interest.
But GPlates doesn’t directly support geological times in the future (ie, negative times). Throughout the history of GPlates development there’s been many assumptions that geological times are past times, and so times must be non-negative, so unfortunately rectifying that (to allow both positive and negative times) would be quite a task.
However one workaround, if you’re not mixing past and future times together is to assume positive times are future times (instead of past times). In other words, think of the times in GPlates as representing future times (and so you can’t then also have past times). It does mean that the GPlates time slider appears to go backward in time (instead of forward). For example, sliding from 200 to 0 goes from 200 million years in the future to present day.
Ah, I see. Thank you.