Inquiry of the vector diagram of plate motion draw with GPlates

Dear Mr./Ms,
I want to know whether GPlates may be used to draw/export vector diagram. In short, I have calculated the movements (e.g., speed and orientation) of many sites within a plate, and there are already the movements (e.g., speed and orientation) of these sites, which are extracted from a plate motion model ( GSRM v.2.1, for example), how can these two sets of data be compared in a vector diagram through GPlates? If GPlates does not own such a capability, which software can be such candidate?
Kind regards
Yongfeng

Hi Yongfeng,

It sounds like you want to display present-day velocity vectors at stationary sites (stationary as in not reconstructed back in geological time). And so you’re wanting to import these vectors into GPlates. If so, then unfortunately this scenario is not supported by GPlates.

GPlates can display velocity vectors but they are calculated by GPlates directly from the plate rotations loaded from a rotation file. As in: each site is assigned a plate ID that indexes into the rotations which not only moves the site location through time but changes its velocity vector (speed/orientation) through time.

In your case maybe you just want to display a set of fixed velocity vectors at present day that are not based on the loaded plate rotation model (rotation file), and so you’re not even planning to load a rotation file, you just want to load the vectors that have been calculated externally. However, even though GPlates can export velocity vectors (eg, to GMT or GPML format), it cannot import them.

You could try using GMT. Or using something like Matplotlib and Cartopy in a Python notebook.

That’s fine for your clarification on this issue. I will try to use GMT.
Thank you very much.