As a general question about the plate reconstruction model used in GPlates, is there sufficient temporal resolution to track the trench retreat speed of the Pacific plate in the proto-Izu-Bonin-Mariana arc from ~52 Ma to ~44 Ma using MotionPath and compare it with geological evidence (e.g. Fig. 5 of Reagan et al., 2019, Redirecting)? I mean, can we recover the rapid speed of trench retreat at the onset of Pacific plate subduction at ~52 Ma and the decrease in speed with time (if this is really true)? I’d like to make a graph of the trench retreat speed of the Pacific plate with respect to the proto-North Philippine Basin.
You can take a look at this GPlately example notebook. It plots the global mean and standard deviation of trench convergence velocity (over points sampled along trenches). It uses this GPlately function, so you could change from convergence to absolute velocity if you want. Or you could filter the sampled points (output by that function) to be within a specific region (eg, a lat/lon box) if you just wanted stats for a local area.
Thank you, John! I will try it.