Restore points in a feature file using different reconstruction times

aries0613 · 17 October 2022 20:42

Hi, I’m trying to restore a list of coordinates to their previous location in pyGPlates, and the assigned reconstruction times are different between them.

I know the function pygplates.reconstruct() can restore points in a feature to a certain reconstruction time.

But is there any way that I can apply different reconstruction times for each point in a feature file?

Thanks!
Jeremy Wu

john.cannon · 18 October 2022 05:32

Hi Jeremy,

You’ll need to call pygplates.reconstruct() separately for each point (or sub-group of points) that has a different reconstruction time.

Since pygplates.reconstruct can accept a single feature (as an alternative to a filename or a collection of features) you can just pass each point as a separate Feature (and pass a different reconstruction time along with it).

siwill22 · 18 October 2022 06:12

This tutorial goes through examples of reconstructing each feature in a set of features to the time associated with the feature:

github.com

GPlates/pygplates-tutorials/blob/master/notebooks/pygplates-reconstruct-to-birth-time.ipynb

{
 "cells": [
  {
   "cell_type": "markdown",
   "metadata": {},
   "source": [
    "# PyGPlates Tutorial - reconstructing a set of features to their 'birth' time\n",
    "\n",
    "This tutorial goes through some examples of how to use pygplates to reconstruct feature collections, using the age properties of each feature to determine the time to reconstruct each feature to.\n",
    "\n",
    "The process is demonstrated by reproducing results of two previous studies where the ; the reconstruction of Large Igneous Provinces to their birth time and the relationship of these locations to deep Earth structure (e.g. Burke and Torsvik, 2006) and the migration of Mid-Ocean Ridge locations through time (Whittaker et al, 2015).\n",
    "\n",
    "These examples demonstrate how pygplates complements the GPlates GUI, by using the same files and reconstruction engine, but allowing us to visualise spatio-temporal data in a way that GPlates GUI does not allow - we can quickly create visualisations that show spatio-temporal patterns through time, rather than only looking at one timeslice at a time.\n",
    "\n",
    "First, we load in the necessary python modules, and load in the default GPlates rotation model"
   ]
  },
  {
   "cell_type": "code",
   "execution_count": 3,

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Basically, you’ll need to write a for loop to iterate over the features (since pygplates doesn’t have mechanism to do that for you).