pyGPlates: restore points to paleomap

[john.cannon]

@caowenrong

Following the example import geometries, I am able to restore the present-day points to their paleo-positions and generate associated gpmlz and shape files.

Great! That was quick.

@caowenrong

Another native question is how to append properties associated with points and restore them back together with the lat and long to a geological time? For example, I have SiO2 wt% for some plutons having lat and long and I want to see how the SiO2 was spatially distributed at 100 Ma?

You can add SiO2 as an extra column in your text file (after lon and lat) and then set that as a property on each point feature that you’re creating.

Have a look at this thread for a discussion on how to do this. Since it’s not a standard GPlates property there are some issues that that thread talks about (like being able to load these imported features into GPlates). But essentially you could do something like:

feature.add(
    pygplates.PropertyName.create_gpml('SiO2'),
    pygplates.XsDouble(SiO2_value),
    pygplates.VerifyInformationModel.no)

…and that would be fine if you stay in pyGPlates land where you could later get back the value from the reconstructed feature (after having reconstructed with reconstruct using the group_with_feature option) with something like:

SiO2_value = reconstructed_feature.get_value(
    pygplates.PropertyName.create_gpml('SiO2')).get_double()

However, as mentioned in the thread, loading into GPlates would be a problem, in which case the thread shows how to use a Shapefile attribute (eg, feature.set_shapefile_attribute('SiO2', SiO2_value)).