I’ve been using GPlates on-and-off for quite a while for a personal project, but I’m clearly rusty enough after a few months away that I’m running into some roadblocks while attempting to start again from scratch.
When attempting to move any of my super-early continental crust (which I intend to start at 4510 Ma), nothing appears under ‘Fixed’, ‘Moving’, ‘Begin’, or ‘End’ while using Apply Reconstruction Pole Adjustment, and so I can’t move it at all. I remember encountering this problem before, but it’s been long enough that I’ve forgotten the solution that worked then, and Googling dozens of different queries hasn’t really gotten me anywhere.
The first 10 million years (I guess the first 390 million years, really) are more of a ‘sketch’ to line out impacts/water/etc. that occurs in the very early stages of my world, but I wonder if something about them could be causing the problem? I never included their ID numbers in the .rot file, because they were never going to move/are meant to disappear as soon as tectonics begins. Compiled image:
Is it that you didn’t give the ‘sketches’ any plate IDs, even though you’ve got plate IDs in the rotation file? Maybe try giving them plate IDs (at least the ones you are adjusting) to see if that fixes it.
If that’s not it then the worldbuilders might be of more assistance.
Sorry I said it in a pretty unclear way - the sketches do have plate IDs (I didn’t even know it was possible for them to exist without plate IDs, I never tried such a thing), but I never included their numbers in the .rot file, everything there’s (what’s intended to be) the ‘movable’ crust.
Maybe try adding them to the .rot file. The Modify Reconstruction Pole tool is essentially modifying existing rotations, so is probably expecting them in the reconstruction tree (ie, the rotation file).
It should be fine - I previously changed this thread to the worldbuilding category.
Hi John,
The reason I know of it is that when I first started using gplates, I started at 4000Ma. This just doesn’t work, so I looked at a tutorial that I used and didn’t understand what was different outside the time, so I redid it just changing it to the time that the tutorial showed (1000Ma) and it worked.
I thought that would be weird, so I tried again at 2000Ma, still fine, 3000Ma, suddenly stops working. Tried 2100Ma and didn’t work either.
With doesn’t work I mean rotations just seem to not stick when you use them on time steps before 2000Ma.
Slight sidenote: if you manually rotate it in the rotation file, it does, but not if you do it in gplates directly
TL;DR: I have no clue where this is coming from, but I do know that no matter what you do, anything beyond 2000Ma doesn’t seem to work. At least when starting from the past and working towards the future for world building reasons
So at least in this simple example it seems to work beyond 2000 Ma.
But I’ll keep an eye out in future for any 2000 Ma limit.
Interestly, I recall a signed 32-bit integer limit, but that applies to plate IDs (not ages), and the limit is 2 x 1024^3 (ie, 2^31). It’s kinda close to 2000 Ma (which is 2 x 1000^3 years). But ages are floating-point so don’t have the same limitation (as integer).
But yeah, it might be worth @doometella giving a try at restricting to 2000 Ma, to see if it works.
I just saw the message you’ve left and have to retract my statement. I don’t know why it didn’t use to work, but I just tried it again and it does. The only thing I’ve changed in my approach since then is that I have re-installed gplates and haven’t touched the problem since it happened 2 years ago by just using 2000 as my maximum. Happy to learn it got fixed or stopped being a bug on my pc at least
