Getting palaeolocation from age and modern location

Q&A
1

Hi.
I am working on an online microfossil database - mikrotax.org - I have already successfully used gPlates to derive custom plate reconstruction maps for plotting microfossil occurrence data at different timeslices from existing databases (Neptune and Triton) which included palaelocations (example). I am now compiling additional occurrence data and wish to use gPlates to calculate palaeolocations. I.e. We have sets of data where we have the modern latitude and longitude and the geological age, and want to calculate palaeolatitude and palaelongitude. These are mainly from DSDP/ODP/IODP sites but also some onshore. Ideally I would like to do this dynamically via an API.
I am sure gPlates is the right system to do this on, but I would be very grateful for a bit of guidance on how to go about this.
Many thanks for any advice
Jeremy Young

2

Hi Jeremy,

There are two options.

  1. pyGPlates https://www.gplates.org/docs/pygplates/
    If your backend is using Python, the pyGPlates might be a good choice. You need to download reconstruction model files to use pyGPlates. The https://pypi.org/project/plate-model-manager/ can help you with that. There is an example of how to use the Plate Model Manager with pyGPlates in the above link. The GPlately https://github.com/GPlates/gplately is a high-level encapsulation of pyGPlates. You might also want to check it out.

  2. GPlates Web Service https://gwsdoc.gplates.org/
    The GPlates Web Service can be used with any programming languages. And you don’t have to download reconstruction models to your local server. You just send HTTP requests to the server and the server will return the reconstructed data. We have a new online paleomap maker as example, but it is still in development now. Currently it can only show reconstructed coastlineshttps://map.gplates.org/. The online paleomap maker uses GPlates Web Service to reconstruct coastlines. By the way, If you have a large volume of data to reconstruct, I suggest you setup the service on your local server. Our server has limited processing power. The GPlates Web Service has been dockerized and can be easily deployedhttps://github.com/GPlates/gplates-web-service/blob/master/docker/README.md.