I am trying to develop a 3D visualization of the Expanding Earth hypothesis.
Has anyone attempted to use GPlates for this purpose? Does anyone have any idea about how to go about this?
My efforts using AI-generated python scripts have hit a wall. I’m aware that pygplates supports a variable radius, but I’m not sure how to incorporate rotation files into my pipeline.
If anyone here is (or knows someone who might be) interested in doing some freelance work on this, please let me know.
I have done a good amount of work with GPlates and pygplates, especially around custom reconstruction pipelines and rotation files. This sounds like a really interesting project and right up my alley.
I would be happy to chat more about the scope and help you get it across the finish line.
Hello, I’d love to try this try too! I once made a small earth model (circa ~120ma) using clay molded copies off a globe onto a smaller sphere. I couldn’t believe how well it worked when using isochrons as my guide. Always wished Gplates had variable radius. Haven’t used pygplates but would love to give this a shot.
I scaled up the continents by 1.5x on QGIS and imported the shapes into GPlates. This works out to a radius ~65%. Here’s a quick and crude mock up for ~120ma - no continental deformations except in southeast Asia. I’m going to do this properly and make 5 or 6 more for different periods. It’ll be a while to do it right but this mock up already shows how well the experiment works if you follow the ocean spreading = Earth expansion hypothesis. Interested to see if you have succeeded in getting variable radius to work on GPlates!
