An Apple Pie From Scratch, Part V Supplement: Tectonics: Using Gplates


This post is a supplement to Part Va; that post described how to simulate plate tectonics conceptually, in terms of what overall patterns of drift, collision, rifting, and so on to expect. This post will be more technical, describing how to use Gplates to turn that concept into a tangible reality. Gplates is primarily designed for use by geologists, and by the standards of similar programs it is amazingly intuitive; but users from the worldbuilding community usually find it awkward to use at first. I still hold that playing around with the program is the best way to overcome that, but hopefully this tutorial will give you a bit more direction.

If you'd rather go through this in video form, friend of the blog Artifexian has been working on replicating this tutorial in his "Artifexia" video series (starting with Part 9).

Basics

Basic use of the program, and the procedure to draw, create, and save “features”.

Startup

Installation of Gplates is straightforward: Follow the instructions below the download link for your operating system. I’m using a Windows PC to make this tutorial, so if you have something else you may find that the appearance and shortcuts are slightly different.

Once you have it installed and open, you’ll see a lot of available tools and options, but many of these are designed for reconstructing Earth’s tectonic history based on geologic evidence, and aren’t useful for building a new world’s history. Don’t worry about what something like the “Hellinger” tool does, as we won’t be using it.

The window should have a list of toolsets on the right side, which can also be selected with hotkeys from “1” to “7”; some individual tools have their own letter hotkeys (though similar the same hotkey may select different but similar tools, depending on which toolset you have open). We’ll mostly just be using the top 3 and the 5th sets.


The “View” toolset (hotkey “1”) includes the movement tools, but even with other tools open you can hold down the “ctrl” key and drag the globe or map with your mouse, and use your mouse scroll to zoom in and out.

Most of what we’ll be doing is handling features: sets of points, lines, or polygons on the globe’s surface. The “Feature Inspection” toolset (“2”) includes tools to select and edit features, the “Digitisation” set (“3”) includes tools to create new features, and the “Pole Manipulation” set (“5”) includes tools to move features.

One tool you may use a lot is the Measure tool (“S”), which allows you to click 2 points on the globe to see the distance between them, even if the planet’s size differs from Earth’s (by altering the “Earth radius” value in the upper right in kilometers).

Timescale

The bar along the top handles the timescale, on a scale of millions of years before the present (Ma); Gplates isn’t built to handle timescales extending into the future. By default the scale only extends to 200 Ma, but you can select the number in the upper left and enter a higher value (you can also change the default timescale permanently in the preferences); I used 1000 Ma for modeling Teacup Ae, but it’s probably more prudent to use at least 2000 Ma to give yourself plenty of breathing space, especially if you want to use longer supercontinent cycles or have an endpoint later in the second cycle than Earth or Ae.


Once you’ve set that, you can use the scroll bar to look through your world’s history and use the play button to see features moving once you’ve added some. But when adding or moving features it’s best to do it at particular time steps, so you should type in a precise time.

To get started making features, set the time all the way back at the start (2000 Ma, if you’re using that).

Making your First Supercontinent

We’ll start out simple: A cluster of cratons and a landmass enclosing them.

To make a craton—or any other polygonal feature—select the “Digitise New Polygon Geometry” (“G”) tool in the “Digitisation” toolset (“3”).


Then draw an object by clicking on the globe to draw vertices; the tool will draw in lines between them, including one from the last vertex you place to the first to close the loop. “Ctrl-Z” will delete the last placed vertex like you’d expect, and you can also use the “Move Vertex” (“V”), “Insert Vertex” (“I”), and “Delete Vertex” (“X”) tools to alter the feature as you create it, or analogous tools in the “Feature Inspection” toolset to alter the feature after you’ve created it.


Cratons in real life have ill-defined and malleable borders, so don’t worry about shape too much beyond “roundish”, “oblong”, “curved”, and so on. Size varies quite a bit, but we’re only worried with the largest ones here, so somewhere around 1-4000 km is about right.


Once you’ve drawn it, select “Create Feature” in the lower right.


This will bring up a new window asking you to select a feature type from a long list. Most of these are just different names for features that behave identically in the program, but a few do behave differently so just select “Craton” and “Next”.


Next we have to define some properties:
  • Leave “Geometry Property” on “Outline”. We shouldn’t ever need to alter this property from the default for any of the features in this tutorial.
  • Plate ID” is used to identify objects that are on the same tectonic plate, and so move together. We’ll discuss how to make that work later, but for now let’s just give each of our cratons its own plate ID, even those we want to initially move together. The IDs are numbers, and we shouldn’t give any features an ID of “0”, as that’s reserved for the immobile “rotation” axis. Let’s give this first craton an ID of “100”.
  • Begin (time of appearance)” and “End (time of disappearance)” define the period of the planet’s history over which this feature exists, and we’ll play around with it later as features are created, destroyed, or change. But the cratons should persist throughout this whole period we’re simulating so select the options for “Distant Past” and “Distant Future”, indicating the feature should exist at all times even if we changed the timescale.
  • Name” is, of course, just a name to keep track of the object. Multiple objects can have the same name, but in this case let’s name this feature “Craton A”.
    • Important note: I've heard from some users that using non-Latin characters (letters not used in English, like Cyrillic characters) can cause issues, such as files not saving properly. This should only apply to the names of feature collections and project files, but it's probably best to just stick to Latin characters everywhere. It seems to apply to the folders the files are held in as well, so make sure your whole filepath contains only Latin characters if possible.


All that done, press “Next” to continue. We don’t need to do anything with the next window, so press “Next” again.

Finally, it’ll ask us to place the feature in a feature collection. The appearance of features in a collection are altered together, so we’ll use these to arrange features we want displayed in a similar way; cratons, continents, subduction zones, etc.

Because this is our first feature, our only option is to “Create a new feature collection”. Press “Create and Save”.


This will open the “Manage Feature Collection” window, which for now contains only your new feature collection. Press “Save As” to name your feature collection (let’s call this one “cratons”; again, avoid non-Latin characters) and save it. Each feature collection will be saved as a separate file, so you’ll want a dedicated folder to keep them all together.


After that you can close your window and you should see your craton has a nice blue color. These colors are assigned by plate ID, so as you add each craton with a new ID it should have a different color (though there are a limited number, so eventually you may get duplicates).


Keep adding cratons in the same way, clustered together but with some space between them. Give each a new plate ID, and rather than creating a new feature collection for each craton, select the existing “craton” feature collection (the window will list it with the full file path) and press “Create” rather than “Create and Save”. For a world with Earthlike land area and tectonic activity around 8-12 cratons is probably ideal, but to keep things simple in this tutorial I’ll just make 3; In addition to craton A, cratons B and C, with plate IDs 200 and 300.


When you have all your cratons down, you can draw another polygon encompassing all of them, which will be your initial supercontinent. It’s reasonable—encouraged, even—to have large stretches of land outside the cratons.


One issue you might run into is that if your supercontinent’s longest axis extends more than halfway around the planet, GPlates won’t be able to tell which part of the world is inside the polygon and which part is outside, which will create issues with filtering rasters and so on. Fortunately, this should be fixed when we break this supercontinent apart later on.

Create this feature like you did with the cratons, but with a few different steps:
  • For feature type, select “ContinentalCrust” rather than “Craton” (I’m not sure this actually amounts to anything, but it’s good to keep things organized).
  • This continent won’t be moving independent of the cratons, so rather than a new plate ID we’ll just give it the same ID as one of the existing cratons—say, that of the first craton, 100.
  • We’ll name it, say, “Continent ABC”, after the cratons it contains.
  • We’ll make a new feature collection for it, “continents”.
And lo, we have our first supercontinent. Before you do anything else, select the “Choose Feature” tool (“F”) in the “Feature Inspection” set, select your continent, and then switch to the Measure tool (“S”). The info pane on the right will include a measure of your continent’s area. Because your supercontinent is the only landmass on the planet, this will be the total land area of the planet.


Compare this value to the total land area of the planet, which is [ 4 * Ï€ * (radius)2], or 510 million km2 for Earth’s radius. Recall that a planet with 1/4 of its surface area covered in continental crust roughly matches Earth’s condition 1 billion years ago, and modern plate tectonics may be impossible once over 1/2 the planet’s area is covered in continental crust. My small supercontinent occupies less than 5% of the area of this planet, which is still reasonable if you don’t want much land area.

To help us keep track of things, you can select “Window” -> “Show Layers” from the toolbar on top to open the layers window. This lets you make feature collections visible or hidden and alter their stacking order (higher feature collections appear above lower ones) and also has a dropdown menu for altering the appearance of features in each collection: You can “Fill polygons” to fill the polygon features with their outline color, alter the “Fill opacity”, and the “Set Draw style…” menu can alter the color set, or set all features in the collection to the same color, or color them by age, etc.


For now I’ve set the continents to be filled with white at an opacity of 0.2, and the cratons to be filled based on their plate ID with an opacity of 0.5, which will help us keep track of land areas once we start adding ocean crust and other features.

Saving the Project

One last thing we should do now that we’ve got some features down is save the project, which we have to do in two steps. Open “File” -> “Manage Feature Collections”, and in the window press “Save All Changes”. The list of features should change from red to white. Then open “File” -> “Save Project As…” and save it in the same folder as your feature collections. This is the file you’ll open to get the project back, but all the feature collection files are necessary for the project, so keep them packaged together.

Once more, remember that GPlates may have issues with non-Latin characters in its filepaths.

Making and Moving Plates

This is the core process of this simulation, and the main reason for using GPlates. It’s a bit awkward at first, but with repetition you’ll get used to it.

Making a Rift

Obviously, this supercontinent is not long for this world; we’ll start the simulation by rifting it apart. Supercontinent rifting can be a multi-step, complicated process, but in this case we’ll just do a clean split down the middle, sending Craton A west and the other cratons east.

Red line and arrows added by me outside GPlates

Whenever I rift a continent apart, I like to draw the rift as a distinct, immobile feature, to help me keep track of how the continents move compared to the initial rifting spot. You can do this by selecting the “Digitise New Polyline Geometry” tool (“L”)—not the polygon tool—and placing a line across the center of the continent. In this case you’ll see that subsequent vertices are connected by the program, but not the last to first. Remember that these rifts are formed by the joining of triple junctions, giving them an overall zig-zag shape, and that the rift shouldn’t pass through any of the cratons.


Select “Create Feature as with any other feature, and proceed through the windows:
  • Set the feature type as “ContinentalRift”.
  • Set the plate ID as, say, “1”, which I reserve for immobile objects (you could put them in 0 with the rotation axis, but I prefer to just leave that alone).
  • Unlike the previous features, we’ll have this one begin when rifting begins (2000 Ma in this case) and then continue into the distant future (this doesn’t matter much at the start of the timeline, but it’s good practice for when we make more rifts later).
  • For naming, I tend to just name small objects like rifts, subduction zones, and island arcs after the year they form, e.g. “rift 2000”, which helps keep track of their age if we have to replace the feature later.


We can also make a new feature collection for rifts, and give them a color like red to stand out.


While we’re on that, we can also create failed rifts, which don’t split the landmass but can cause new rifts and river valleys later on, at each of the triple junctions. We’ll use the polyline tool and make the feature type “ContinentalRift” like the main rift. But we want these features to move with the continents, so we’ll assign each the same plate ID as the nearest craton on the same side of the nearest rift, tying the rift’s motion to that craton.

If you can’t remember the plate ID, you can use the “Choose Feature” (“F”) tool to select a feature and see some info about it near the bottom of the window (it’ll display the info for all objects near where you’ve clicked, so don’t worry about selecting the exact feature). Don’t be alarmed that the rift you’ve drawn disappears when you select this tool; it’ll appear again when you return to the digitise tools.


Create the feature with that plate ID, and beginning at the same time (2000 Ma) as the main rift. Let’s also create a new feature collection for failed rifts, and give them a more muted silver color.

Splitting a Feature

So that tells us where the rift is, but if we’re going to split this supercontinent into 2 continents, we’ll need more than the one continent feature we have. There’s no tool for cutting polygons apart (there is one for polylines), but a couple tools we can use to make new features.

First off, select your feature (If you ever have trouble selecting from multiple features, use the list at the bottom) and select the “Clone Feature” option on the right.


Place it in the “continents” feature collection when prompted, and you’ll get a new feature identical to the original continent, including plate ID and beginning and ending times. We gave the supercontinent the same plate ID as craton A, so we’ll convert this clone into the section containing that craton. Select the “Move Vertex” tool (“V”) on the left, making sure you’re in the “Feature Inspection” toolset (“2”).

You should see the vertices of the continent as white points, which you can now click and drag to move. Leave those on one side of the rift unmoved, and move those on the other side to match the rift. Don’t spend too much time trying to line them up exactly; it’s not as if actual continents perfectly preserve their shape after rifting anyway.

If, like me, you run short of vertices, you can use the “Insert Vertex” (“I”) tool to add more; if you end up with spare, you can use the “Delete Vertex” (“X”) tool to remove them. Ultimately, you should end up with a feature encompassing the entire former supercontinent on one side of the rift.


Return to the “Choose Feature” tool (“F”) and select “Edit Feature” (“ctrl-E”) on the right.


This will bring up a window allowing us to alter some of the feature’s properties. In particular, we want to change the “gml:validTime” property; un-select “Distant Past” and set the feature to begin at 2000 Ma, when the supercontinent rifts. To keep things straight, we should also change the name to “Continent A” to match the cratons it contains.


Repeat the same process again to create a “Continent BC”, but this time when editing the features also change the plate ID to match that of one of the cratons it contains—say, 200 for Craton B.


Finally, select the original Continent ABC feature, and set it to end at 2000 Ma. This doesn’t matter much at the beginning of the simulation, but when you repeat the process for rifts later in the simulation, the result will be that you have one feature up to the time of rifting that instantly splits into two objects at the time of rifting that can then drift independently.


In principle we could also do this in reverse to merge features, But I prefer to preserve boundaries in case there’s a later rifting event that breaks along that same boundary, and also because it may help in drawing topography later on.

Making a Rotation File

To move plates over time and record these movements, we first have to create a rotation file.

Open up a basic text editor (I like to use Notepad++) and input these lines (you don’t actually need more than one space between columns, but it helps keep things organized):

100  0.0     90.0    0.0    0.0   000  !
100  2000.0  90.0    0.0    0.0   000  !

Each line describes the position of a plate at a given point of time, and each column describes some aspect of the plate or motion, like so:

Plate ID
Time
Latitude
Longitude
Angle
Conjugate Plate
Comment
100
0.0
90.0
0.0
0.0
000
!
100
2000.0
90.0
0.0
0.0
000
!

  • Plate ID is, of course, the plate ID that is being described. All features in each plate ID always move together.
  • Time designates the time at which the plate has this position. The important thing to remember is that gplates will read this file from the present backwards, as opposed to our simulation process with proceeds from the past forwards; this will come up a few times in later steps.
  • Latitude, Longitude, and Angle describe the position of the plate in terms of an Euler rotation. You don’t have to worry too much about what this means for now, but in short latitude and longitude describe the position of a rotation axis on the globe, and the angle describes the rotation of the plate around that axis. The rotation at time 0.0 should always have latitude 90.0, longitude 0.0, angle 0.0, indicating no rotation (changing it will cause issues with some features later). Presuming we want objects at the start of the simulation to begin where we draw them, the plates should have the same rotation at the start (time 2000.0 in this case).
  • Conjugate Plate allows us to define the position of one plate relative to another. Entering 000 defines the position relative to the unmoving “rotation” axis, and so basically allows us to move that plate independently. Setting it to another plate ID will cause this plate to follow all that plate’s movements (it can still have some movement of its own relative to that other plate). So, for example, if we want Craton C to follow Craton B at the start of the simulation, we can set the conjugate of C’s plate, 300, to be B’s plate, 200. Now when we move Craton B, C will follow it.
  • Comment allows you to place any notes after it; name of the plate, events happening at a certain point, etc. Even if you don’t use it, you still need to place the exclamation mark.
So here’s how that all appears for my supercontinent, with Continent A splitting from Continent BC:


Once you’ve got all that, save the file alongside your feature collections as “rotation.rot” (set “save as type” to “all types” or save it as a .txt file and rename it).


Back in GPlates, select “File” -> “Manage Feature Collections” (“ctrl-M”), and then press “Open File…”. Find and select “rotation.rot” and open it. It should load in as a new feature collection.

Moving the Plates

Finally, the exciting part. The basic process here is to move time forward in timesteps, move all the plates around, and then move forward again.

I like to use a timestep of 50 million years—long enough that we won’t have to do too many to complete the simulation, not so long that we’re losing important details. If there’s a complex collision I might slow down to 10 My timesteps in that area, and of course you can decide what to do for yourself.

Whatever you decide, set the timeline forward by one timestep—to 1950 Ma in this case—and select the “Pole Manipulation” toolset (“5”). Then select “Choose Feature” (“F”) and select a feature with the plate ID of the plate you want to move. Select “Move Pole” (“O”) and then “Enable pole” on the right. A sort of round arrow should appear pointing out of the north pole.


Using this tool and the “Modify Reconstruction Pole” tool (“P”), you can move plates around using Euler rotations, like I mentioned before. These are a bit awkward to get used to, but using them helps give you realistic plate motion. In essence you move the pole, and then rotate the plate around that pole. As you do, the program shows you a “ghost” of where features in that plate will move to.

Again, red lines and arrows added outside GPlates

You can select “Highlight children” on the right so that the ghost also includes features in other plates tied to move with the plate you’ve selected, and “Reset Rotation” to undo any movement you’ve done and start over.


Linear motion and rotation always accompany each other on the surface of a spherical globe, but you’ll want more of one or the other in different situations. Placing the rotation pole close to the center of your plate will give you more rotation, and placing the pole far from the center will give you more linear motion (there is only one pole shown, but the rotation axis it represents passes through to the other side of the planet, so functionally the furthest the pole can get from the plate’s center is 1/4 of the way around the globe).


You can also move the plate with the pole at one point, move the pole, and then continue moving the plate.

Blue arrow added outside GPlates as well

If a plate extends across a large portion of the globe, movement in one part will manifest as rotation in another, and vice-versa, so you can’t have one without the other; this tends to limit the lengths of single divergent or convergent boundaries.

Once you’ve decided on where you want to move the plate, select “Apply” on the right. Press “Okay” on the window that pops up, and you should see the features in the plate pop over to where you’ve moved them.


If you scroll back in the timeline, you can see the plate smoothly move over to its new position.

Checking and Finalizing Plate Motion

So that's how to move plates, but is the motion realistic? You can consult the main tutorial for general patterns, but we can check the speed of plate motion right now.

Select “Utilities” -> “Open Kinematics Tool…” from the top (“ctrl-shift-K”). In the window that pops up, put in the plate ID of the plate you want to analyze, set the timescale to the period you want to look at, and set the “Display type” to “Velocity magnitude”. You should get a graph of average velocity magnitude over time in the window for that plate, and you can mouse over it (or check the table above) to see the velocity over the period of motion in centimeters/year.


I talked about plate speed in the main tutorial, but in short here are typical values:

Situation
Subducting Ocean
Recent Subduction Collision
Active Margin Continent
Passive Margin Continent
Plate speed (cm/year)
8-20
6
3
<1

So my motion for Continent A at ~3.4 cm/year is fast but reasonable. If you find that your motion is unrealistic, or for whatever reason you want to change it, then you can move the plate again and apply the new rotation; so long as you do this at the exact same time as you originally applied the rotation, it will overwrite that previous rotation, and the plate will move smoothly to this new position when you look back through the timeline (you can also reload the “rotation.rot” feature collection, which will reset all rotations back to the last time you saved them to the file).

To finish up, one issue with simulating plate movement forwards while GPlates reads the rotation file backwards is that, when you move the timeline forward again by another timestep, the plate will start shifting back towards its original position. This isn’t too problematic at the start of the simulation, but can start getting annoying as you approach the end.

Luckily, it’s not hard to fix: First, open “File” -> “Manage Feature Collections” (“ctrl-M”) and save the “rotation.rot” feature collection, which should remove the red highlighting.


Then open the “rotation.rot” file in a text editor and find the line showing the latest position of the plate other than at 0.0 Ma. Copy this line above it, and change the time column to “1.0”. This gives that plate the same position at almost the end of the timeline as it has at the latest point we’ve simulated to (while still not messing with the position at 0.0, which could cause issues).


Save “rotation.rot” in your text editor, go back to GPlates, and in the “Manage Feature Collections” window, reload the rotation.rot feature collection to update it to match the file.


Checking through the timeline, you should see that the plate no longer moves between the last time at which you’ve moved it and 1.0 Ma, and then snaps back at 0.0 Ma to its original position. You’ll have to do this again, at each timestep, for every plate you move in that timestep (you can leave alone plates that are moving with their conjugate plate but don’t move relative to the conjugate plate in that timestep). This can be a bit tedious, so it’s up to you when it’s necessary.

Making Flowlines

Flowlines are useful features to visualize the opening of new ocean basins and keep track of the mid-ocean ridges. To make one, let’s go back one timestep to the start of the simulation. Select the rift feature you made, and select “Copy Geometry to Digitise Tool” on the right.


Then select the “Digitise New Multi-Point Geometry” tool (“M”) to switch the feature from a polyline to points, and press “Create Feature” (If for whatever reason you don’t have a rift feature to copy, you can just select this tool and trace the boundary between diverging plates).
  • Select “Flowline” for the feature type.
  • Input the plate IDs of the landmasses on either side of the rift (e.g. 100 for Continent A and 200 for Continent BC here). Which is on the left or right doesn’t matter, and the plate IDs don’t have to be those of the objects directly on either side of the rift, though that’s generally a good practice. The plate IDs also don’t have to those of independently moving plates; you can select one being moved by its conjugate plate.
  • Have the feature begin at the point of rifting (e.g. 2000 Ma in this case).


In the next window, select the “Add” option. This will open another window. In the “Insert multiple times” section, input a “From” time when the rifting starts, a “to” time far later, and for the “in steps of” option put a some fraction of your timestep; for a 50 My timestep, 10 My works pretty well. Press “Insert” and you should see a list of times appear in the window above.


Press “OK” and “Next”, and create a new feature collection for flowlines. When all that’s done, you should be able to move the timeline forward and, as the landmasses move apart, a series of lines appears connecting their coasts. The yellow dots in the middle show the position of the mid-ocean ridge; note how, because the continent motion isn’t perfectly symmetric, the mid-ocean ridge moves off the position of the original rift.


One good application of flowlines is that they can help check for unrealistic plate motions: Adjacent flowlines generally shouldn’t pass over each other (to a small extent deformation of the crust can accommodate minor examples of this), and they should never pass over existing sections of crust, except where subduction is occurring; as a divergent plate boundary spreads, the flowlines can help you see when it is no longer possible to have spreading along the whole boundary and you need to add a subduction zone.

Ideally we could place flowlines first and then see how they appear when we move plates, but for whatever reason adding rotations to the plates that flowlines are attached to can cause them to oddly “drift” (it seems to happen specifically when an existing rotation is overwritten). You may find that you have to delete and then recreate the flowlines fairly frequently.

An example of both unrealistic plate motion (flowlines overlapping each other and the continents) and the "drift" I mentioned (the endpoints should be on the coastlines).

Adding Ocean Crust

Another benefit of the flowlines is they can be used to add sections of ocean crust. Select the flowlines feature, copy the geometry, and then select the “Digitise New Polygon Geometry” tool (“G”). This will give you the start of a polygon with one edge on the mid-ocean ridge, and then you can trace over the nearby coastline to get a polygon encompassing all the new ocean area opened on one side of the mid-ocean ridge (GPlates will add new vertices to one side of the existing line, so make sure you start on the correct side to get a neat closed loop; and again, don’t spend too much time trying to exactly line up your new polygon with the coastline).


Press “Create Feature”:
  • Select “OceanicCrust” as the feature type.
  • Give it the same plateID as the continent it’s attached to.
  • Have it begin at the current point, one timestep after the rift opens, as it wasn’t fully formed until now (this means that between timesteps there will just be some open space between the rifting continents, but that’s unavoidable).
  • As with small features, I like to name ocean crust pieces after their date of formation, e.g. “ocean 1950”; this gets very useful in keeping track of their ages later on when it may be necessary to replace the features.


Finish creating the feature with a new feature collection for ocean crust. Follow the same process on the other side of the rift, adding it to the same feature collection, and we now have our new ocean basin filled with fresh crust.

In terms of display, it’s useful to have the ocean crust features retain the colors of their plate IDs to tell them apart when there’s many crowding the ocean, but perhaps we should give them a very light fill—say, 0.1 opacity.


Going forward one timestep and moving the continents again, the process of adding new ocean crust will be the same, but this time trace out the boundaries of the existing ocean crust pieces, rather than the coastlines. You shouldn’t have overlapping sections of ocean crust except where one is subducting under another.


Creating the feature is much the same process:
  • Give it the same plate ID as the crust section it’s attached to.
  • Have it begin at the end of the current timestep, and name it accordingly.
  • Put it in the same “ocean crust” feature collection.
And so on, as the ocean continues to grow.

Adding Subduction Zones and Island Arcs

Mid-ocean ridges are only one part of the equation, of course; as new crust created here, old crust must be subducting elsewhere. Trying to figure out how subduction would work in the initial ocean without any initial ocean crust would be a tricky task, but luckily it’s normal for a supercontinent to start surrounded by subduction zones just before it rifts; we can just let those subduct away the old oceans.

Return to your first timestep, and look back and forth through the simulation to try and get a sense of where the leading edges of your continents are.

Given motion of the plates (red arrows), I've marked out the leading edges (blue lines)

Then go back to the start of that timestep, when the continents start moving, and use the “Digitise New Polyline Geometry” tool (“L”) to mark out subduction zones just offshore of your continents along their leading edges. They need not be directly offshore, mind; you can have some excursions away from the coasts, or pass across the mouths of large bays, and at the ends of the leading edges of the continent you can have them extend further outward, so long as they’re still perpendicular to the motion of the plate.

Press “Create Feature”:
  • Select “SubductionZone” for the feature type.
  • Give them the plate ID of the nearest craton on the continent they’re formed by.
  • Have them begin at the same point you make them—at the beginning of the timestep where the continents start moving, and name them accordingly.


Make a new feature collection for them, and there we are: Fresh new subduction zones, which should appear as lines colored by their plate ID.


These subduction zones will, of course, cause volcanism and the formation of new continental crust on the overlaying plate. Along the continental coasts this will cause orogenies, but we’ll worry about those later. A more immediate concern is the creation of island arcs at sea.

My rule of thumb is that island arcs form one timestep—50 My—after the subduction zone first appears (the one exception is at the very end of the simulation in the last timestep, when even newly formed subduction zones should get small island arcs). So let’s move forward one timestep, and then select the “Digitise New Polygon Geometry” tool (“G”). On the trailing side of any subduction zone in the ocean, start drawing out an arc of small islands, each no more than a couple hundred miles across.

Rather than tediously drawing a lot of individual features, I prefer to draw the islands as one object by first drawing one side (the “bumps” are islands and the straight sections the gaps between them)…


…and then drawing the other side, tracing over the connecting lines between islands to make bars that should hopefully be too thin to see on the world map.


Create the feature:
  • Feature type “IslandArc” (or ContinentalCrust, it doesn’t really matter)
  • The same plate ID as the subduction zone that formed it.
  • Beginning at the current time, one timestep after the subduction zone appeared.
  • And finally, give it its own feature collection.
And though I’m calling these “island arcs”, they can include spurs of land attached to nearby continents where the subduction arc passes from coastline to ocean.


Once we make an island arc, we don’t need to touch it again unless it’s involved in a collision or rifting event. Actual island arcs develop more gradually—appearing fairly early and growing over time—but what we’re drawing here are more abstract representations of island arcs than actual mappings of islands. Once you’ve finished the simulation, you can edit the resulting map outside GPlates to add larger islands to old arcs.

One thing to remember about subduction zones is that they don’t only appear when a continent rifts apart or changes direction; If we say that these continents are subducting some of the ocean to their south, then as they move apart that subduction zone will spread along the new ocean’s southern border. So with each timestep, we have to add new sections of subduction zone and island arcs on that boundary.


This also has the nice tendency of naturally forming long arcs, because of how the plates move across the globe.

Complex Plate Interactions

Now that we have a feel for basic plate motion, let’s go through all the types of rifting, collision, and subduction you should encounter in simulating tectonic motion.

Importing Rasters

We’re about to move into some more complicated procedures, where it’s useful to keep track of every individual feature, so we’ll just take a quick detour to input some rasters to help that process along.

Rasters are just visual overlays on the globe. Any map in an equirectangular projection—an even grid of latitude and longitude, which is twice as wide as it is tall—can be imported as a raster; this is a pretty useful function for gplates even when you’re not using it to simulate plate motion.

But in this case we’ll just use flat color rasters, like this 1000 by 500 pixel beige image that will be our “land” raster:


In Gplates, go to “File” -> “Import” -> “Import Raster…”, and select your raster. The program accepts a pretty wide range of image file types; I used a .png in this case. Give the raster band a name if you like, leave the default options on the “Georeferencing” window, and create a new feature collection.

Once you’ve done all that, you should see the whole world colored by your raster. Select “Window” -> “Show Layers” (“ctrl-L”) if you don’t already have the layers window open, and find your raster on the list. In the “Inputs” menu, find “Reconstructed polygons” and press “Add new connection”.


From the dropdown menu, select “continents”, or whatever you’ve named the feature collection containing your continents. This will now restrict the raster to only appear within the polygonal features in that feature collection.


Set the rasters “Opacity” down to “0.5” so that we don’t obscure any underlying features.

Add all your features containing distinct landmasses (just island arcs for now, but microcontinents, accreted terranes, and continent fragments later on). Then, in the layers for the continents feature collection, you can un-select “Fill polygons”, set the “Fill Opacity” back to ”1.0”, and use the “Set Draw style…” menu to set it back to color by plate ID. This means that the raster will mark out land areas, and the features will be neatly outlined with colors matching their plate IDs. We can do this with ocean plates as well, using another raster (it’s probably best to place the water layer below the land layer in the list, to avoid confusion when ocean crust starts subducting).


Hopefully that should make things a bit clearer moving on.

Splitting Comoving Plates

So we know how to tie plates to move together at the start of the simulation, but what about when we want to rift them apart later on? Like, say, our Cratons B and C?

To start out with, the procedure is similar to creating our first rift: We already have a failed rift between B and C, so let’s copy the geometry of that and extend it outwards (you can use the “Insert Vertex” tool (“I”) to add new vertices to both ends of the line) But we want it to extend not only across the continent, but all the way to the mid-ocean ridges and subduction zones on either side—that is to say, across the whole tectonic plate.


Make the rift with a beginning at this new rifting point, have the old failed rift end at the same time, and make new failed rifts branching out from this new rift (we only need them on land). We can also have the old rift from the start of the simulation disappear a timestep or two after it formed to avoid unnecessary clutter and confusion.

Then we can split the continent and other polygonal features that cross the rift (ocean crust, island arcs) like we did before, by copying each feature twice and altering the copies to match the shapes of the old features on either side of the rift, but with different plate IDs.

But rather than having the original features end at the point of this rifting and the copies begin at the same time, we can just delete the originals and have the copies exist from the beginning (whenever the original feature formed), such that there were always two features with different plate IDs but they were moving together until now. This preserves the in-program age of the features, which can be useful with “color by age” display functions later on.

Split the features at the point of rifting (left) such that they exist as separate features from the start (right).

At least, we can do this with ocean features; for continents we’ll probably have to use the “original ends as copy begins” option to account for deformation in collisions later on.

For features just on one side of the plate, we can just change the plate ID if necessary, rather than creating a copy. For polyline features that cross the rift (e.g. that eastern subduction zone) select them and use the “Split Feature” tool (“T”) to split each into two features, and change the plate ID of one.


With the features sorted, next we have to edit the rotation file. Open “File” -> “Manage Feature Collections” (“ctrl-M”) and save “rotation.rot”. Then open “rotation.rot” in a text editor.

Find the latest position of the plate you want to split from its conjugate plate, other than its position at 0 Ma. In this case, we haven’t moved plate 300 (relative to its conjugate plate) since the start of the simulation.


Copy that line above, and change the time to that of the rifting event.


Leave the file open and go back to GPlates. Open “Reconstruction” -> “View Total Reconstruction Poles” (“ctrl-P”). This will open up a window showing a list of plates in a cascading tree, showing which plates are the conjugates of which other plates. Find the plate you want to split from its conjugate (300 in this case) and look at the last 3 columns, under “Equivalent rotation rel. anchored plate”. This shows the current position of this plate relative to whatever plate we’ve set to be the anchored plate, which by default is 0, the immobile rotation axis.


Create a new line for your plate at the point of rifting, above the line you just made, and input the same plate ID and time, but copy over the “lat”, “lon”, and “angle” values from those columns in GPlates, and set the conjugate plate to “000”. Then copy this line above again and set the time to “1.0”, or replace a position for this plate with that time if you already have one.


Save “rotation.rot”, and in GPlates reload it in the “Manage Feature Collections” window. You should now be able to move the plate independently of its former conjugate.


You’ll have to add new flowlines, and perhaps remake some old ones—in this case, the flowlines between Continent A and former Continent BC have to be remade to connect Continent A to each of the new continents (splitting the original rift may help).


We’ve also made a triple junction in the mid-ocean ridges here; When making new ocean crust features, we’ll have to project out their edges so that they meet roughly in the middle, accounting for the different speeds of the spreading plates.


We’ll then have to add new flowlines here (3 with 1 point each, 1 for each plate-plate boundary) to track the position of this extending section of the mid-ocean ridge, and be sure to trace over them as we add more ocean crust in the future.

Rifting often comes with changes in direction, so watch out for new regions of subduction—such as along Continent B’s northern shore here.

Making a New Plate

So that all works to split an existing plate away from its conjugate, but what if we want to create an entirely new plate partway through the simulation? What if, for example, we want to split off the eastern part of Continent C into a microcontinent?


Again, the procedure starts out pretty similar to previous rifting events: Mark out a rift, tracing any available failed rifts (though you don’t have to follow the whole rift, you can leave a section behind on one side or another), and create new failed rifts. Those on the microcontinent side we’ll give a new plate ID; say, “301”, as a small, probably ephemeral plate split from plate 300.

For features crossing the rift, create a copy on the side of the existing plate (Continent C) as you would normally. But for the side with the new plate (the microcontinent) select the feature and use “Copy Geometry to Digitise Tool”. Move the vertices to trace out the feature on the new plate’s side of the rift, as you would with a copy, and then create a new feature with most of the same properties as the original feature—feature type, time of appearance—but the plate ID of the new plate (301) and, where appropriate, a new name (say, “Microcontinent 1” for the main landmass). We might as well also make a new feature collection for microcontinents, as opposed to craton-containing continents, and add them to the list of polygons using the land raster.

We have to do this process—copying geometry and making a new feature rather than just directly copying the old feature—for every object on the side of the new plate, even if they don’t cross the rift. Simply changing the plate ID of a preexisting feature causes it to move elsewhere on the globe, due to how the position is recorded as a combination of original location and subsequent rotations.


Now, save “rotation.rot” in the “Manage Feature Collections” window and open the file in a text editor. Add in two new lines for the new plate at time 0.0 and the time it rifts from the other plate (1850.0 here). Give it a position of “90.0”, “0.0”, “0.0” for lat, lon, and angle as all the other plates start out with, and give it a conjugate plate of “000” at both times.


Save the file and reload it in GPlates. Now open “Reconstruction” -> “Specify Anchored Plate ID…” (“ctrl-D”) and enter the plate ID of the plate your new plate is splitting from (300).


Then open “Reconstruction” -> “View Total Reconstruction Poles” (“ctrl-P”), find your new plate (301), and look at “Equivalent rotation rel. anchored plate”. Open “rotation.rot” in the text editor again, and create a new line for the new plate (301) under the existing lines, with the same time as the rifting event, the lat, lon, angle position from the window in gplates, and the old plate (300) as the conjugate plate. Then copy that line and change the time to the beginning of the simulation (2000.0).


Save the file and reload it in GPlates. Open “Specify Anchored Plate ID…” again and set it back to “000”. If you scroll back through the timeline, you should see that the new plate properly follows the old plate before the rifting event, but can be moved independently afterwards.

Subducting Ocean Crust

We’ve covered just about every case of divergent boundaries, but let’s start thinking more about convergent boundaries. Adding subduction zones around the exterior of the initial supercontinent is easy enough, but sooner or later you’ll have to add them between your continents, in the area covered by new ocean crust. In fact, you should make a point of doing so every other timestep or so, to add a bit of variety to the process rather than just marching from one supercontinent to the next.

How new subduction zones form is, as I’ve mentioned in the main tutorial, not settled science. For our purposes, you can either extend an existing subduction zone or create new ones at transform rifts. You should prefer to divide old ocean crust from either newer ocean crust or continents, but you can cut through similar-age crust where necessary. As a generally rule of thumb, try to make sure that any ocean crust more than about 3-400 million years old is heading towards a subduction zone.

In this case, Continent A has been turning north, putting pressure on the northern side of its attached ocean, so let’s make a new subduction zone through there.


This, of course, cuts off some of the ocean crust on Continent A’s plate. For these sections, make a new ocean plate just like we made that microcontinent plate before (though in this case there’s no need to bother with a rift feature, as there will be no mid-ocean ridge to keep track of). Call it, say, Ocean i, with plate ID 101. I’ve also switched subduction zones to all display as blue to stand out more.

For whatever reason GPlates picked the same color for plate 101 as for plate 200 (green), but you can tell where it is by the color and direction of the flowlines.

As we move forward in further timesteps, the ocean plate will by pulled into the subduction zone, faster than it was moving with the continent before, and the continent itself will also be somewhat pulled by the new subduction zone. The opening of a new subduction zone should always be accompanied by a shift in motion of nearby plates.


Once a section of the subducting plate has completely passed through the subduction zone, we can set that feature to end to clear up some of the clutter. But at the same time, new ocean crust will continue forming at the mid-ocean ridge. With subduction zones on both sides of an ocean basin this can form a stable “conveyor belt”, with new crust being formed just as soon as old crust subducts. In this case, with subduction on one side, the mid-ocean ridge is being pulled towards extinction.


The general rule of subduction zones is that there must always be ocean crust feeding into them. It can come in directly or at a high angle, and it can slow to a crawl, but you can’t pull crust out of the subduction zone. This is easy enough to say now at the start with the tectonics of the exterior ocean left unmapped, but it can be tricky to pull off once the entire planet is covered in new plates. In particular, watch out for those subduction zones on the trailing edges of plates; the ocean crust has to move towards the subduction zone faster than the subduction zone is receding away.

In this case, it doesn’t take long for ocean i to be totally subducted; in one more timestep, the mid-ocean ridge has passed through the subduction zone. There’s no need to even make a new section of ocean crust for that plate at this point; we can just set every feature in the plate to end at this point.


This means Continent B’s plate is now being subducted, and it can be expect to accelerate towards the subduction zone. But the ocean crust on A’s side of the subduction zone isn’t getting any younger; in cases like this with an offshore subduction zone, it’s fairly common for another subduction zone to open up behind it along the coastline, pulling the outlying subduction in towards shore until it collides with the continent. But in this case we’ll leave the situation as-is in order to avoid having too many moving parts in the next section (though over longer timescales, you’ll probably find that this process helps “clean up” odd subduction zones and islands that are tricky to deal with otherwise).

Colliding Continents

Continent collisions are, as a rule, messy affairs, and it’s worth taking our time to move through them. I still make major plate motions in 50 My timesteps, but I then make some changes in finer 10 My steps.

So in this case, we have Continents A and B barreling towards each other, with an island arc “trapped” between them.


Moving one timestep forward causes the Continents to collide, with several of their features overlapping—an unphysical situation we’ll have to resolve. Collisions don’t always end neatly at the end of a timestep, like this one has; You want the movement rate to be consistent with the previous timestep, but you don’t want to end up with too much overlap; cratons in particular shouldn’t overlap each other. This might require you to move the plate at some point during the timestep, rather than at the end.


First, that island arc: go back through the timestep and figure out exactly where along the other continent it is colliding.

Beginning (left) and end (right) of the island arc's collision with Continent A

Then, at some point during the collision, make a new feature all along that boundary, representing the accreted terrane formed from the crust of the island arc. Even though we haven’t been recording the growth of the island arc after its first appearance, take its age into mind; older arcs will contain more crust and create larger terranes.


Create the feature:
  • Feature type “ContinentalCrust”.
  • Plate ID of the continent it’s accreting to (so, 100 here for Continent A)
  • Beginning at the point of this collision.
  • Name it after that date of collision.
  • Create a new feature collection for accreted terranes.
Once that’s done, add that feature collection as an input for the land raster, and have the island arc end at the same time as that new terrane appears.


By the way, if you have an island arc colliding with an island arc, this can create an accreted terrane as well on one of the plates (If it’s two plates subducting a third between them, place the terrane on the plate with younger crust in the area, with the subduction zone on that plate surviving while the other is lost), unconnected to any continent. Usually this terrane should end up accreting onto a large continent before long, but that may not happen by the end of your simulation.

With that done, we can move forward to the main part of the collision at the end of the timestep. When continents collide, much of the crust between them is compressed and deformed; here, we’ll account for that by redrawing the borders of the features involved such that there are no overlaps between crust features.

Select one of the features; I’ll start with Continent A. Copy it’s geometry, and then move some of the vertices in the new polygon along the collision boundary such that they create a new ragged boundary roughly halfway between the boundaries of the overlapping features (you can add some vertices as well). But some of the compressed crust will be squeezed out to the sides, so you can expand out the features to either side of the boundary.


Create a new feature with all the same properties as the old feature you’re copying, but beginning at the point of this collision. Then edit the old feature such that it ends at the same time.

Repeat this for all the other features deformed by the collision (in this case, Continent B, the new accreted terrane, and the island arc on Continent A’s side), making sure that there are no gaps left along the collision boundary (unless there’s a substantial trapped sea) but no overlaps between crust features. No major gaps or overlaps, anyway; again, don’t spend too long trying to get everything to match up perfectly. Note that it’s not unusual for small features, like that trapped terrane, to moved completely outside their original position in this process, given that we’re not simulating the whole process of continuous deformation.

Cratons do deform a little in reality, but not much; for this simulated process, you should be able to leave them alone, and if that ends up with them overlapping features outside they’re continent, then you’ve overlapped the colliding continents too much.

The downside of this process is that it alters the age of the features. This is an issue only if you want to use some display options that depend on the age of the features. For example, some of the expanded continental crust is now overlapping ocean crust features, but I want to preserve the ages of those. To deal with those, I can split the ocean crust features into 2 features—one containing all the crust still in the ocean, the other containing the crust that is now overlapping the land—and edit the one overlapping the land to end at the point of collision.

Finally, clean up the subduction zones—edit those now overlapping the landmasses to end at this point (use the “Split Feature” tool (“T”) to cut those only partially overlapping and make only the overlapping sections end) and add in extra sections as necessary to fill gaps along the boundary.


That handles all the features, but the very last step of colliding the plates is tying the plate IDs together. This works just like breaking them apart, but with different conjugate plates. In this case, let’s set plate 100 as the “parent” plate and make plate 200 the “child” plate, tying it to move with plate 100 as its conjugate plate.

Save the “rotation.rot” file and open it in a text editor. In GPlates, set the parent plate (100) as the anchored plate, and find the child plate (200) in the “Total Reconstruction Poles” window. In the rotation file, make a new line for the child plate (200) above the latest line in the simulation (which should be the plate’s position at the end of the collision; 1650.0 Ma in this case) and fill it in with the position data for that plate under “Equivalent rotation rel. anchored plate” in GPlates, with the parent plate’s ID (100) in the conjugate plate column. Also copy this position, with the conjugate plate, to the plate’s position at 1.0 Ma.


Save the “rotation.rot” file, reload it in GPlates, and set the anchored plate back to 0. You should now find that moving the parent plate moves the child plate with it. This doesn’t mean you can’t move the child plate at all; if the collision doesn’t finish in one timestep, you can continue to move the child plate relative to the parent plate in the next timestep, as the plates move across the globe together (you will, of course, have to deform the features again at the end of that timestep to handle this continued collision).

In this case, there’s still that long subduction zone to the south where Continent A’s plate is subducting Continent B’s. In an actual simulation, I’d deal with that either by forming a new subduction zone along the south coast of combined Continent AB, pulling in the island arc to collide with the coast and eventually pulling Continents AB and C back together; or I’d rotate Continent B around until it eventually collided with Continent A’s south coast. But this tutorial is almost over, so I’ll just ignore them for the sake of simplicity.

Splitting Plates After a Collision

When continents collide, the suture remains as a weak point in the crust, and new rifts can form there later on (this doesn’t usually happen immediately, but we’ll do it for the purposes of the tutorial). I won’t go through the whole process here—it’s essentially the same as the earlier section on splitting comoving plates. The one note I want to make is that the rift shouldn't pass exactly over the suture point between pre-existing features; there is always some exchange of “territory”.


Split the features crossed by this rift much as we “deformed” them in the last section:
  • Copy their geometry.
  • Create new features occupying the space of that old feature on either side of the rift (with plate IDs to match the plates on that side).
  • Have these new features begin at the point of rifting.
  • Edit the old feature to end at the point of rifting.
I’ll leave it up to you whether or not to create a new feature collection for fragments of continents broken away from the main continent features.

When you’ve done all that and edited the rotation file to split the plates again, they should be able to split with everything on the correct side of the rift.


Not only is this accurate to how old sutures rift in reality, it's also a good way to gradually add more detail to your coastlines.

Marking Resulting Features

That about covers the whole process of plate motion in GPlates; Continue on to the end of the simulation, following the broad outlines of tectonic processes as outlined in the main tutorial and the specific steps as outlined in this one. But when you’re done, you still have to go back through the timeline and add some features that result from these plate motions; orogenies, LIPs, and hotspots.

Adding Orogenies

Orogenies are major mountain-building events that appear along convergent boundaries. As mentioned in the other tutorial, there are 4 major varieties:
  • Andes-type orogenies, which form thin mountain ranges on any coasts with subduction just offshore.
  • Laramide-type orogenies, which form broader ranges when subduction is particularly rapid or where a mid-ocean ridge is subducted (the science is unsettled and both are probably contributing factors, but the latter possibility is easier to spot in GPlates).
  • Ural-type orogenies, which form thin ranges in simple collisions between landmasses.
  • Himalayan-type orogenies, which form broad, high plateaus in more complex or energetic collisions between landmasses.
In GPlates, we can start out by placing Andes-type orogenies as polygonal features near any coastlines with subduction zones at the start of the timeline. You can use the measuring tool to get a sense of proper size; 100 km from the coasts and 100 km wide is a good standard.


Create the feature:
  • OrogenicBelt” as the feature type.
  • Plate ID matching the landmass it’s on.
  • Beginning time matching that of the subduction zone causing it.
  • Whatever name you like (“orogeny” and date of formation works fine for me).
  • A new feature for “Active Orogenies”.
Once you’ve created your orogenies, open the layers window (“Window” -> “Show Layers” or “ctrl-L” if you don’t already have it open), find the layer for active orogenies, select “Fill Polygons” and then “Set Draw style”, and set it to black in the “SingleColour” list.


The orogenies will now stand out as black shapes.


Continue forward in the timeline, adding orogenies to the landmasses as new subduction zones appear. We needn’t bother with them on island arcs, though; these can be assumed to always have active volcanism and young mountains—at least until they collide with a continent, at which point they’ll form a new Ural-type orogeny anyway.

Where it gets interesting is when landmasses collide. First off, whenever an island arc collides with a landmass (or another island arc), the accreted terrane that forms should be essentially entirely covered by a new orogeny.


Then when major landmasses collide, an orogeny should form along the border between plates after you’ve deformed the colliding features, encompassing all the regions and boundaries that have been deformed (to clearly see the boundaries after collision, set the time to slightly after the collision; e.g. 1649.99 Ma rather than 1650.0 Ma).


If there are existing active orogenies in the region—from previous stages of the collision or subduction preceding it—you should stretch this orogeny to include them. But sometimes when there’s a lot of overlap between the plates prior to deformation you’ll find that a preexisting Andes-type orogeny extends too far over the boundary to be reasonable, when in reality it would have been compressed into the mountain range during the collision. To handle these cases, you can split the feature into 2 copies; one encompassing that area that will continue on, and another encompassing the area you want to remove, which you can edit to end at the time of the collision.

The section of the orogeny to end at the time of collision

But unlike an Andes-type orogeny, these collisional orogenies are short-lived. Gradual deformation and uplift can continue for a while, but sometime after you’ve concluded the collision in GPlates—50 My is good if that’s your timestep—we can consider the orogeny no longer “active”, and it will start to erode down.

To show this, we have to replace these “active” orogeny features. Select the features in the orogeny (there will often be multiple), copy their geometries, and create new features—same feature type and plate ID, but beginning at this point (50 My after the collision ends) and placed in a new feature collection for “Former Orogenies” Edit the old features to end at the same point. If an orogeny involved in this former collision still has active subduction along part of its length, you can split it into copies; one containing the ongoing active orogeny and one to be replaced by a former orogeny.

In the Layer’s list, find “Former Orogenies” and select “Fill Polygons” and “Set Draw Style…” In the “FeatureAge” section, select “Monochrome”. This will cause the features to begin black, like the active orogenies, but fade to white as they age.


(While you’re here, you should also set “Active Orogenies” above “Former Orogenies” in the layers list, such that any new orogenies appear over older orogenies in the same region.)

The only issue with this is that once the feature is over 450 My old, for some reason the feature flips back to black. This is long enough that the mountains should be pretty much eroded flat, but the “roots” (tough rock formed under the surface) could still be uplifted and exhumed by later events, so we should still keep track of them. To do this, replace the features again with features in a new feature collection for “Old Orogenies”, and color them white (and place the layer for that feature collection below active and former orogenies).

Of course, sometimes rifts will split these orogenies. We can deal with that like most rifting of features—by copying the geometry and creating new features on either side of the rift. The catch is that instead of having new features begin at the point of rifting and the old features ending, you need to have the new features retroactively begin at the same time as the old feature did, such that it displays properly.

The distinction between Andes-type and Laramide-type orogenies—and between Ural- and Himalayan-type—is hazy, and really these are endpoints on a continuum rather than distinct category. For subduction orogenies, just generally add thicker orogenies on leading edges for faster-moving continents, and particularly thick ones when a mid-ocean ridge subducts (and make the thicker inland regions turn to former orogenies when these conditions end, while retaining a thin coastal range). For collisional orogenies, consider multi-stage collisions, high collision speed, and many pre-existing sutures between features in the collision area all as factors that can thicken the orogeny.

Adding LIPs

LIPs—Large Igneous Provinces—are much briefer events than orogenies, but can still produce substantial highlands of igneous rock, so are worth recording. In a broad sense they can be treated mostly like orogenies, but not as persistent and not as deterministically placed; some will be associated with major rifting events, especially supercontinent breakups, and some will appear more-or-less at random. Many LIPs in reality appear in the ocean, but for our purposes we need only record those on land.

At the end of each timestep whether or not you want an LIP in that step, and if so draw it as a feature:
  • Feature type “LargeIgneousProvince”.
  • Plate ID of the landmass it appears on.
  • Have it exist for only 10 My, starting or ending at the timestep boundary (the latter case—ending at the end of the timestep—is appropriate if you want an LIP immediately preceding a rifting event that starts at the beginning of the next timestep)
  • Place it in a new feature collection for “Active LIPs”.
This approach means the feature will show both in still images at each timestep, and in a continuous video of the whole process.

As with orogenies, you should create a “former LIP” feature in a new feature collection that remains after the LIP concludes. You can also have “old LIPs”, but LIPs older than 450 Ma don’t have much impact on modern geography—they’re not often uplifted and exhumed like orogenies—so it may not be worth recording them anyway. Also like orogenies, whenever a former LIP splits you have to split the feature such that the proper age is recorded; if an LIP forms in association with a rifting event, you should just make it as two features on either side of the rift from the start, though it should still initially appear as one object straddling the rift.

How you display LIPs is up to you, but I like to display active LIPs as filled orange polygons, and then just keep former LIPs invisible most of the time to avoid confusion with orogenies—you’ll need these LIPs as reference for making topography later on, but they’re not as important as the orogenies.

Adding Hotspots

Hotpots are concentrated regions of volcanism, similar to LIPs but at a smaller scale and often more persistent. Most are immobile; they do not move with the plates in the crust (some do move, or are specifically associated with tectonic activity on the surface causing tears in the crust, but we’re just marking the immobile ones here). The landforms they create on the surface, however, do move with the crust, creating distinctive “island chains”.

Hotspots don’t typically persist for more than 1-200 My, and the landforms they create don’t often last long after they cease, so we only have to mark those hotspots appearing in the last few timesteps. Some will be “leftovers” of LIPs, appearing where the LIP formed but remaining static as the plates move. Others will appear more-or-less randomly.

To make a hotspot, set the time to where you would like the hotspot to appear (they shouldn’t appear only in 50 Ma timesteps, but finer 10 Ma timesteps should be fine) and select the “Digitise New Multi-point Geometry” tool (“M”). Place the hotspot (or cluster of hotspots, which isn’t unusual) where you would like it to start. Create the feature with “HotSpot” as the feature type, a plate ID for a plate that doesn’t move (I use “1”, same as for my rifts), a start point at the current time, and an end point in the “Distant Future”. Place it in a new feature collection for “Hotspots”. How you display it is up to you, but I find that purple is a good color that stands out from the others I’ve used so far.


Now we need to give it a trail, which is similar to the process of making flowlines. Select your hotspot feature, copy the geometry, and create a new feature with the feature type “MotionPath”. Give it the ID of the plate overlaying the hotspot (in this case, the hotspot appeared under ocean crust in plate 300) and for the “Relative Plate ID” give it an ID of “0”, for the immobile rotation axis (I think you could use another immobile plate, if you added it to the rotation.rot file with 0 rotation at the start and end of the timeline, but I haven’t tested this).


In the next window, press “Add” and under “Insert multiple times”, set “From” to the time the hotspot appears, “to” to “0.00”, and “in steps of” to “10.00”. Like I said, much like how we made flowlines. Press “Insert in that section and then “OK”. Finish creating the feature, with a new feature collection for “Hotspot Trails

When that’s done, you should find that you can move the time forward and see a trail emerging from the hotspot, matching the motion of the overlaying plate, and with arrows every 10 My pointing in the direction of the plate’s motion--away from the current position of the hotspot. Again, display is up to you, but I chose a gold color here.


The island chain will follow this trail, with islands growing older and more eroded down further from the current position of the hotspot. Like former LIPs, I tend to keep these trails invisible most of the time, but hold onto them as references for making topography.

Adding Mid-Ocean Ridges and Plate Topologies

I actually wasn’t aware of these features when I made the main tutorial (all the divergent boundaries there were drawn in by hand) but they may be of use to other people.

First off, it might be nice to have a persistent mid-ocean ridge feature. The process is almost identical to making flowlines: Go back to the point of initial rifting and select the rift feature. Copy its geometry, then create a polyline feature—not a multi-point feature, as with flowlines. Make the feature type “MidOceanRidge” and then in the properties window select “Half Stage Rotation” under the “Reconstruction Method” window.


Have this feature begin at the time of rifting, and give it the plate IDs of the plates on either side of the rift, just as with flowlines. Give it a new feature collection (For display, I like to color them red) and you should now see a persistent line at the center of the ocean basin with ocean crust originating from it.


As with flowlines, you may have to draw in extra sections by hand at each timestep by triple junctions.

Once you have all those in place, you can use them in combination with subduction zones to create a plate topology. Topologies are objects in Gplates that use multiple features to define their geometry, and deform over time as these features move relative to each other. We can use them here to mark out tectonic plates.

In the “Topology” toolset (“4”), select the “Build New Boundary Topology” tool (“B”). In turn, select each of the subduction zones and boundaries surrounding the tectonic plate you’re marking out (go in a circle, not jumping around to different spot) and press “Add”.


When you’re done, create the topology feature, with the feature type as “ClosedPlateBoundary”, a plate ID matching the plate you’re marking out, beginning and end times matching that of the plate (e.g. distant past or time of rifting for beginning, distant future, time of collision, or time of total subduction for end), and a new feature collection for “Plates

When you’ve done that, you’ll have a feature encompassing your plate, stretched or compressing as the plate does. Here I’ve set the plate to be filled with opacity 0.5 to show it:


As new sections of subduction zone and mid-ocean ridge appear, we can add them to the topology with the “Edit Topology Sections” tool (“E”) (after adding them, the toolbar at the bottom can let you reorder them so the topology boundary doesn’t weirdly cut through the center of the plate). Of course, not all plate boundaries are subduction zones or ridges; you’ll have to draw in transform boundaries and convergent boundaries within landmasses by hand.

And, much as with continent features, you may have to accommodate the splitting or combining of plates by making one plate topology end at the same time as another begins, with altered boundaries. Unlike continent features, there's no need to preserve old boundaries; features with different plate IDs that are tied to move together can be counted as one tectonic plate.

Finishing and Exporting

We’ve pretty much covered everything necessary to run the process of simulating tectonic features in GPlates; all that remains now is to export the result in a form we can put into a more usable image editor. But the result will probably end up looking pretty cluttered. For displaying the maps, there are a few adjustments we can make.

Final Touches

For one, turn all your rasters up to full opacity, or else overlaps along the boundary will stand out. You should also set the “water” raster to fill in the entire background of the globe (eliminate all reconstructed polygons in the layer menu for it), or create a new raster for that purpose in a different color (this tends to look weird in video, because the new ocean crust only appears in timesteps, though perhaps you could add a topology to fill in that space). Features which are not filled polygons (e.g., Continents, microcontinents, ocean crust) can then be set invisible, such that their boundaries are no longer seen but the position of landmasses is still shown by the rasters. This gives a much less cluttered appearance.

You can also reorder the layers to make sure everything you want to appear is visible: Here’s my typical order (layers in parentheses are usually kept invisible except on maps specifically showing them):
  • Subduction zones
  • Other convergent boundaries
  • Mid-ocean ridges
  • Transform boundaries
  • (Plates)
  • Hotspots
  • (Hotspot Trails)
  • (Failed Rifts)
  • Active LIPs
  • Active Orogenies
  • Former Orogenies
  • Old Orogenies
  • (Former LIPs)
  • (Cratons)
  • Land Raster
  • Water Raster

An example of how the input should typically look (though I left failed rifts on)

You can also, if you so desire, remove the graticules (lines of latitude and longitude) by selecting “View” -> “Configure Graticules…” and setting both “Latitude delta” and “Longitude delta” to “0”.

Exporting Images

Finally, the images are ready for display. In addition to the default globe view, the “View” menu at the bottom gives you a few options for map projections. “Mollweide” is a good option if you want to display the maps immediately; e.g., if you want to show snapshots or a video of your world’s tectonic history. But if you want a map you can further alter outside of GPlates—presumably, a map of the last point at the end of the simulation timeline—then “Rectangular” is a better option, as you can then import the altered map back into GPlates or other programs (Maptoglobe, GProjector). In fact, it’s probably best to have multiple maps of the endpoint, showing different features (landmasses, orogenies, LIPs and hotspots, etc.).


Once you’ve selected a projection, if you don’t like the distribution of landmasses—e.g., if the map is centered on an ocean and all the continents are near the edges—then you can select “View” -> “Set Projection…” and alter “Central Meridian” to “move” the focus of the map around the equator.

Also make sure to select “View” -> “Camera Location” -> “Set Location…” (“ctrl-shift-L”) to set latitude and longitude to 0, and set the zoom (bottom of the window, next to the list of projections) to 100% before exporting a map (except for an image of the default globe map). You should end up with the map neatly centered in the screen.


Finally, select “Reconstruction” -> “Export” (“ctrl-shift-E”). Most of this window is fairly straightforward: At the top, the two main options are “Export Time Sequence of Snapshots”, which is ideal for producing a video or a set of images at each timestep, and “Export Single Snapshot Instant”, which makes a map (or maps) at one time. We’ll look at the latter one first.

Set the time you want to export, and select “Add Export…


There are a huge range of options for export files, but most will only export some of the objects. To get all of them, the two best options are “Projected Geometries (and Rasters)”, which produces a vector file in .svg format that can be used in programs like Inkscape and Illustrator, and “Image (screenshot)”, which produces a raster image in any of various file types (I usually use .png) that can be used in programs like Paint.net and Gimp. You don’t have to pick just one, mind; you can add multiple date types to one export.

Select the data type, change the resolation and input a name if you’d like them different from the default templates, and select “OK”.


Add more export types if you like, set a good “Target Directory”, and when you’re ready select “Export Snapshot”. When it’s done, you should be able to find the finished map(s) in the directory you set.


For the “Time Sequence” option, the procedure is the same, but for each format it’ll produce images in the range and at each increment you specify. If you want a video, 1 My is a good increment, you should use “Image (screenshot)” as the export type, and for the output template you should use just “%n”, such that it produces a numbered series of images. Some video editing programs (e.g., I used Da Vinci Resolve, though it’s probably a bit overpowered for the purpose) will automatically import that as a video.

And with that, we’re finally done. I’m sure there are even more useful functions in GPlates that you can find if play around with it, but this is all you need to know to replicate my process in the main tutorial.

Buy me a cup of tea (on Patreon)

Comments

  1. You are a god sent.
    I know i'm going to do this week-end

    ReplyDelete
  2. Very informative tutorial! I'd just like to point out that the surface area of a sphere is 4 pi times the SQUARE of the radius, which seems to be a typo in your tutorial.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi, your tutorial is great!

    But I have a big doubt. . . How do I make Craton C move with Continent AB and Craton B? Do I have to change the ID of the Craton C to match that of the Craton B?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Give Craton C its own plate ID for convenience if you want to tear it off later, but when you first make the rotation.rot file put in Craton B's plate ID as the conjugate plate.

      Delete
  4. I'm having a bit of trouble getting my flowlines to match up with my continents. Is there a specific way that I should move them?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hey, I'm not sure if you're the same guy who posted the other comment a bit later, but in case you're not see my response to them below.

      Delete
  5. Hi, I've been having a bit of trouble. Whenever I construct flowlines, and even when I double check to make sure I followed the instructions to a T, they're always unnatural. They almost always go over the coastlines of both of the continents, and I don't know what I'm doing wrong.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I can't really say what's specifically wrong without knowing more, but flowlines are a bit tricky and there are a few things you may want to keep in mind:

      Don't judge how reasonable your flowlines are until you've moved both plates.

      As mentioned, flowlines can sometimes "drift" for no apparent reason. If you originally placed the ends of the flowlines on the coasts of your continents, and later on the ends have moved, that's not something you've done wrong, that's a bug with the program.

      If a plate boundary between just 2 plates extends across more than half the planet, it's impossible for it to be diverging along the entire length. With at least 3 plates all diverging it should be possible, but tricky.

      Similarly, if a boundary between 2 plates marks out more than half a circle, it can't be diverging; you also can't have the boundary running into any concave bays or inlets. Bear in mind that the objects here are sections of continental crust, not the actual shorelines of the landmasses.

      In the early stages of divergence, the euler poles for both plates should usually be pretty far from the rift itself, such that the motion is more "linear translation" than "rotation". But you'll still often have something of a hinge-like motion.

      I hope some of that helps.

      Delete
  6. Do you have any recommendations for a text editor on Mac? I'm having trouble with opening the rotation files (I'm saving it as a .txt file and renaming it).

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm afraid I haven't used a mac in a long time, but I think any very basic text editor should do it. Maybe look around on the gplates website.

      Delete
  7. I am following the tutorial and its really useful but whenever i move my continent it only moves following one plate, should i change all the other plate ids to 1 and if I do then how can I change them back without messing up stuff later?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm honestly not too sure what you're describing. Each object should only have one plate id it moves with. If you change them all to 1 id, they'll all move together.

      Delete
  8. This is a really great introduction to this program! Thank you for sharing what you've learned!

    I have one question though- do you have any suggestions for what to do if I have a (very) rough idea of how I'd like the continental plates to be distributed?

    I ask because I know I want my planet to be in the run-up to the formation of the next supercontinent, with all of the continents rather close together, but not yet done with the assembly. I also know I want most of my land to end up in the Southern hemisphere, and with virtually nothing north of 45 N. More specifically, I want this world to be home to a country I had created before hand, and it has very particular requirements that would affect its small region of the globe- that there exist an active margin west coast in the mid-latitudes of the southern hemisphere that recently collided with an oceanic LIP.

    I give these examples not to ask for direct advice on them, but to ask about the general principle of how to address designing a geologic history when you already know some details of how you want it to turn out. I tried starting up at 2000 Ma and after advancing 50 million years immediately started worrying about what would happen if the final outcome I got could not accommodate what I needed- would I have to do the whole process again? I think it would be a bit absurd to go through 20 iterations of a 2 billion year history just to have to re-do it again when the landmasses broke my constraints-

    -but at the same time, I don't want to just slap continents down on a modern-day map and have to create only the illusion of a real past history. I don't know if you'd have anything you feel is useful to say about this tension in the process, but I'd appreciate your thoughts . Thanks for the guide again, this is a very high quality worldbuilding resource you've put together, especially for geology.

    P.S.

    I feel guilty leaving such a long post so I'll add a resource of my own that may be interesting, if you haven't already seen it:

    https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ab0205

    This paper details an analysis of Kepler data and describes the effects of stellar metallicity on the characteristics of planetary systems for the host star. Lots of interesting implications for a sort of typology of planetary systems that would be useful in guiding the worldbuilding process.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I think you'll find that, even though there are some hard rules to follow and restrictions on the reasonable outcomes, there's still a lot of control you can exert on the specific outcomes; you have a lot of control over where new subduction zones and rifts appear, and over exactly how fast and in which direction plates move. If a continent is moving in a direction you don't like, you always have the option of just sticking a new subduction zone on one of its coasts to yank it in a new direction. So long as you're not too picky about exactly how every little detail on the entire globe comes out, I think you can get pretty much any endpoint you want.

      It's also worth noting that continental drift is, to a large extent, agnostic to the actual orientation of the planet (there may be some tendency for supercontinents to drift towards the equator, but given how long gondwana spent over the south pole, it's clearly not a hard rule). This means that you can just take your outcome and shift it around relative to the rotation axis, and apply that retroactively to your whole history. I actually did something like this with my example world: the original model in GPlates is flipped the other way around, with Steno east of Hutton and Wegener southwest of Lyell and so on. But I didn't like how the climate zones came out in that version, so I've been taking the images exported from gplates and flipping them east-west to get the version you see on the blog.

      And if all you want to do is shift stuff around without flipping them, you can even do that within Gplates: create a new plate id, set that as the anchored plate, and then any rotation you apply to that new plate id will be, in effect, inversely applied to your entire geological history, while retaining everything's relative position and motion to each other.

      So, for example, wherever your final cluster of continents ends up, you can just move it to the southern hemisphere, and rotate it around to make sure there's an active margin on a west coast somewhere--then just go back a little ways and add an LIP there, as the position of those is largely arbitrary (aside from the occasional rift-associated one).

      Delete
  9. Hi, thanks for the tutorial! I've been working on going through the workflow myself and mostly it's been going great, but I ran into a few issues when I tried to do my second continental rift, and I had a few questions.

    First of all, when I first tried to split off a third continent (like in the Splitting Comoving Plates section), it became very difficult to move all the continents while not having flow lines cross each other or crust. Let's call the newly split continents A and B and the one that split at the start C. Some of the flow lines between A and B and between B and C were pretty close to each other by that point because parts of the original rifts were close to perpendicular to the motion of the plates. This made it so that the motion between B and C had to be almost perfectly away from each other after their rift, which then caused some of the attached oceanic crust of B to collide with A's. I tried to fix it, which then caused C's oceanic crust to collide with A's, and other solutions caused flow lines to go over crust. Eventually I was able to get it to barely work, although with slight overlap of two flow lines and with fairly slow motion of C in the direction of it's subduction zone. When you mention that flow lines should never cross crust, I'm assuming that's referring to oceanic crust as well, right? Should I be creating rifts that have fewer acute angles that cause close flow lines for what I want to work better? How close should the triple junctions of a rift be to 60 degrees usually? Or is there a different solution to this situation?

    Also, I was wondering a bit about ways that subduction zones close. Does it just happen when the subduction zone gets either subducted itself (like what you mention at the end of Subducting Ocean Crust) or when the ocean completely closes (and doesn't jump to the other side of the continent), or are there other ways for it to close?

    Another question I have has to do with another part of those rifts. When I made the rift between B and C, I extended it across their attatched oceanic crust as well, but I didn't line up the points of the rift with the points for the different sections of oceanic crust like you do in Splitting Comoving Plates and Making a New Plate. When I tried adding flow lines for the triple junction of the mid-oceanic ridge, this made things especially confusing to figure out where the points should be, where the flow lines should go between, etc. Should I be making the rifts through oceanic crust simpler and match the points in the oceanic crust sections? Do you do this for yours? It's hard for me to tell in the main tectonics article because the individual time step oceanic crust sections aren't shown.

    Finally, I just had a few general questions about how some things might be affected by differences between my planet and Earth. Mine has a slightly larger radius (1.03 earth radii), but almost exactly the same surface gravity due to a somewhat smaller metal core (0.997 g and 0.28 metal core mass fraction). I know elsewhere you mentioned that there isn't much known relating planet size and tectonics, and I imagine the amount of difference in mine wouldn't affect much, but another factor is that my planet has around 7%-8% more surface area than earth, and as a result more water evaporating. I was wondering how this might affect the erosion of orogenies as well as their initial height. Also, the atmosphere will likely have to be thicker than earth's once I get to more climate-related things due to a greater distance from it's star (possibly in the 1.5-2.5 atm range), so I'm also wondering if that would affect erosion and the height map as well or not.

    Again, thank you so much for these articles; I've been interested in worldbuilding for years, but this blog is a bit part of what inspired me to actually start working on and designing a world of my own.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Glad to be helpful, thanks.

      Alright, so for the first one, this is a pretty common issue with rifting, trying to get everything to move apart right without overlapping. I find it helps if you have all the pieces moving away from a common spreading center near the middle of the old supercontinent (which is what mantle convection should tend to encourage anyway), and relatedly try to give large rifting continents a sort of hinge-like motion, moving apart faster on the end closer to the spreading center, which tends to give the rifts a bit more breathing space. You may still end up having to redo the rift to be a bit straighter if you just can't get it to work out, though, that's a mistake I've made a few times too (triple junctions do start off at close to 60 degree angles, but they vary, and the eventual continental rift doesn't have to perfectly follow the original rifts formed by the triple junctions; we like to depict rifts as lines but really they're more just hazy regions of extension). It doesn't have to be completely perfect though, in reality the crust can compress a bit if squeezed. You could alternatively add a subduction zone where bits of crust are overlapping, which would then eventually drag your continents back together.

      As to subduction zones, basically the only way to completely stop a subduction zone is to close the ocean basin with 2 continents colliding. Otherwise they can slow down, or sort of merge into one another when one subduction zone is subducted by another, but they never stop completely.

      Yeah, dealing with ocean crust and flowlines at triple junctions can be a bit confusing. Honestly my approach in the main article was even messier than this, there was a lot more guesswork in figuring out where the triple junction was between steps. Putting a rift through bits of ocean crust is fine--necessary in many cases--but you should probably split that section of crust into 2 objects to save yourself a bit of confusion.

      I don't think more surface area implies much about erosion; there's more area for water to evaporate maybe, but also more area to spread out rain on, and in general modelling of exoplanet climates seems to indicate that a lot of the important factors pretty much just scale with area, and aren't too sensitive to the total area of ocean cover (like the difference between 10% and 90% ocean cover may be significant, but not the difference between 70% and 80%). Atmospheric pressure may have a bigger impact on erosion, but I'm honestly not too sure what, that's a bit more specific than current climate modelling usually gets. I don't think one extra atm will do anything terribly obvious, though.

      Delete
  10. Thank you so much for making this tutorial! Unfortunately, I’m stuck pretty early on, and I’m not entirely sure why. I can’t seem to get Craton A to parent with my Craton E and G for rotation—they’re on the same continent that’s splitting from the first supercontinent.

    I made sure that Craton A’s Conjugate Plate matches Craton E’s Plate ID in the ROT file. I tried duplicating one of the other cratons that I successfully parented, and changed that duplicated craton’s Plate ID and Name to 100 and Craton A. I tried redrawing a new Craton and naming it an entirely new Plate ID and Name—all while updating the ROT file accordingly. And nothing has worked still. The other half of the supercontinent, Continent BCDF, was successfully parented and will rotate altogether.

    Is there something I might be missing or overlooking?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. My first guess would be that you should check that the conjugate plate is set right for that whole period, with no other rotations set in that period (to start out with at least): remember that GPlates reads these files backwards, from 0 ma back to 2000 ma or whenever your start is. So to switch over a plate's conjugate plate, you need to have a line specifying that both at the point of transition, and another one at some point in the distant future (though like I say in the tutorial, avoid changing the position at 0 ma, that'll cause problems). If that's not the issue, I suppose just double-check all the plate ids to make sure they all match up right.

      Delete
  11. Hi! This tutorial has been really helpful! I have encountered a slight problem though. When I make a new connection to my "continents" feature collection in landraster -> Inputs -> Reconstructed Polygons -> Add new connection, the raster only applies to the continent that breaks off from the main supercontinent. It applies to the whole planet before that. I made sure that all the continents I had were in the "continents" feature collection. I asked a friend online yesterday to try it on their computer, and they couldn't get the raster to show at all. They may have made a mistake while doing it; I was supervising them online. I sent them my project and all my feature collections. Any help would be appreciated!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Is it just the one big supercontinent that it's not appearing for? Does it stretch more than halfway around the globe? If so, gplates may not be able to distinguish "outside" from "inside" for that polygon so it doesn't fill it in.

      Delete
    2. Thank you! Even though the supercontinent took up less than half the planet's surface area, it still did stretch a bit over more than halfway across it in two directions. I completely forgot about that. Do you know of any way around this? Also strangely even if the continents fit completely in the screen in 3D orthographic projection mode (which I guess half of the planet is visible), you still sometimes have to make them a bit smaller.

      Delete
    3. I presume you'll eventually want to break up such a large continent anyway, so you can just have it broken into multiple continent objects from the start, but keep them together until they actually rift.

      Delete
  12. This is a wickedly helpful tutorial - thank you for all the detail! After playing around with simple landmasses you use in the tutorial, I'm trying to create something with a larger number of cratons to reflect the 8-12 cratons you say is realistic for an Earth-type world. I've successfully gotten to a second rift and broken away a craton to move independently. However, the issue I'm running into is how to get another craton to follow the newly independent craton.

    To start, my first rift created a continent with Cratons A, B, C, D, F, G, and I. Craton A was leading with all others following. With the second rift, two new continents should form - the first includes Cratons A, B, C, D, and I, while the second includes Cratons F and G. I've successfully programed my rotation file to have Craton F rotate on its own and to have Cratons B, C, D, and I continue to follow A. However, I cannot figure out how to get Craton G to follow Craton F. I've successfully gotten Craton G to NOT follow A by using the same rotation code format used to break F away from following A. But then G just floats out on its own and I cannot figure out the appropriate code to enter into the rotation file to tie it to F's rotation.

    Any help is appreciated!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It should be as straightforward as setting F's plate as the conjugate plate for G. Basically combine my approaches for splitting co-moving plates and colliding continents, but do it in one step: Switch F directly from following A's plate to following G's plate.

      Delete
    2. Or rather make G switch from following A to following F, got F and G confused for a second, sorry.

      Delete
    3. Ah, thank you! I was overthinking it and entering two new lines to reflect G stopping following A and then starting following F, but just the single line to have G start following F was what I needed. Thank you!

      Delete
  13. Hi! This tutorial has been extremely helpful! Thanks for making it! But I have run into a problem. When trying to create ocean crust one timestep after I have already created some, since the already existing ocean crust has the same plate ID as the plate it borders, it moves with it. I don't see you mentioning this as a potential problem in the tutorial, and I'm nearly sure I've followed it perfectly. How can I fix this?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. This sounds like what should happen. Once new ocean crust forms, it continues to move with the attached plate, and then new crust continues to form on either side of the mid-ocean ridge. Unless I've misunderstood the issue?

      Delete
  14. I've got a small addition I can suggest to your tutorial that might make drawing of the slices of ocean crust slightly easier and less time-consuming: use isochrons and topologies to create the boundaries.

    First create the mid-ocean ridges so that they are drawn with half-stage rotations, and at the edges where there will be transform faults, place a pair of single-point at each end of the spreading rift. Then create a line topology joining the two opposite points so that as the plates move apart, the transform fault grows. At each time step, copy the mid-ocean ridge geometry to a new line feature, set the type as an Isochron, and give it a Plate ID of one of the plates and a Conjugate ID of the other. Make sure to check the "Create Conjugate Feature" option.

    Once you've created all the isochron features you want, use the Boundary Topology tool and select two adjacent isochrons and the corresponding transform line topology feature, then create the feature. This will create a closed polygon corresponding to the edges of that feature. Save the ocean topology features in a separate collection to the isochrons so that the isochrons can be hidden once all the crust is done. If any of the vertices of the corresponding topological boundaries change, the ocean crust will also change.

    It does get a bit tricky to align everything when the topology is composed of multiple sections, but if you do the boundary topologies as a final stage, it's easier to split ocean crusts along new subduction or rifting zones. Once you're certain of the shape, copy the geometry of the boundary as a static polygon that appears and disappears at the appropriate times. The boundary topologies should be saved in a temporary layer and deleted when they're no longer needed.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's not a bad idea actually. This whole post needs a bit of an edit pass so I may add that as an alternative.

      Delete
    2. The method I suggested works fairly well to ensure everything lines up during the break-up of a continent, and can also assist creating oceanic crust strips that retain the correct age even after they're cut by a subsequent transform or subduction boundary.

      I am struggling with something though: how do you figure out the rotation and movement of a Pacific-type oceanic plate that develops out of a triple junction? I can sketch the boundaries of the plate by using single points and topologies, but I cannot figure out how to actually draw any features on the new plate that move with it.

      Delete
    3. I'm not sure I exactly understand the issue. Objects with the same plate id as that plate should move with it. It should start with fairly little velocity, until it inevitably ends up involved in subduction.

      Delete
    4. I was having an issue working out the rotation of a plate that originate at a triple point (like the Pacific Plate did). The initial boundaries were composed of topologies that linked points whose position was given by half-stage rotations.

      Example: A, B and C are moving away from each other, so you can put a point between each (half-stage rotations), and then draw a topological line connecting two adjacent points (A-B, B-C, C-A). How do you work out the rotation of the shape that is bounded by those lines? It doesn't have a Plate ID, because it's not a "real" feature.

      Delete
    5. If you want it to be a plate, you should probably start creating features there and assign them a new id. And like I said, it will largely start out without any significant velocity or rotation; regardless of how the boundaries are shifting over time, the crust itself is formed at the rift and then essentially just sitting in place because there's no subduction pulling at it. Though, there will be some "ridge push" at the sides and convection currents along the base that will presumably be uneven and impart some net force to the plate, but I'm not aware of any good approach to estimating what that ends up being, so you're largely free to just arbitrarily decide what that is, though it'll still work out to slower motion than subducting ocean plates.

      Delete
    6. I had a little trouble understanding the suggested isochron idea. It sounds like a good idea, but would it be possible to get clarity regarding that method?

      Also, it was mentioned that the article as a whole should receive an update, or edit pass. Has that happened, yet?

      Delete
    7. Hey sorry I missed this over the new year. Robbie's description is about the best I can give right now (it's using some of the same type of topology tools as I mentioned near the end of the guide), I haven't played around with Gplates in a while so I'm honestly having a bit of trouble remembering how to work with it myself.

      I'm updating all the posts in this series in order, I've done just the first 3 so far. The "Updates to Existing Posts" page in the sidebar is tracking my progress there.

      Delete
  15. Wonderful stuff! One thing is when I try to parent one landmass to another it just... doesn't. And when I specify anchored plate ID ia reconstruction, it moves that plate and all its children downwards

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'd guess there's probably some issue with the rotation.rot file; make sure that you're covering the correct period of time in there, that you're accounting for how gplates reads that file from the present backwards, and that you've reloaded it after editting.

      Delete
  16. Hey! That's being really helpful in my project! Thank you!
    But i'm having problem making an independente plate follow another one. I have a microcontinent split from continent 500 (the child being 501) then i want to make 501 follow plate 100, but i Just can't figure out how.
    I made another plate (500) hit a third one (800) and managed to make 500 follow 800, but with the microcontinent 501 things are not working bas It should.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'd need to know a little more about what exactly is going wrong, sorry.

      Delete
  17. Hi, I have an issue with splitting one of my continents apart. When I change an ID from following another to just moving independently, the newly split-off one just seems to jump halfway around the world from its intended position when I move back a timestep (before the split was meant to occur). I can't seem to fix the problem; would you happen to know anything about how to?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi, sorry, I haven't been keeping a close eye on my comments; First off this may be me misinterpreting, but to be clear you should try never to change the id of an object after it already exists, either change the id of what it's following or create a new object with a different id. If that's not an issue, it's probably an issue with the rotation file; always remember that it reads motions from the present backwards, which can be a bit counterintuitive when you're creating motion from the past forwards.

      Delete
  18. Hello! I've read through everything in the Teacup Ae series and loved it a ton! I've starting things on my own a couple of times, but always run into the same issue and was wondering if you could provide some insight.

    I can always manage to split the initial supercontinent apart, although the two halves basically have to move directly away from one another without any rotation. But then when I try to create a second rift, I can never make things move properly so they don't overlap with the rift itself, existing terrain, or the old rift.

    In the second rift which splits half of the supercontinent again, the two halves spread apart not only from each other but also from the original rift, right? I haven't been able to finagle a movement that allows for that.

    I've included an image to show what things look like. I'm not sure if I'm making the rifts or continents in an incorrect way that prevents things from working properly, or if I just don't know the right trick to move the plates correctly.

    Thanks

    https://imgur.com/a/vPXiZAY

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I think you could make that case work if you moved the southeast continent almost directly south relative to the northeast one, and kept the western one moving east. Shifting the western stretch of the rift a bit south so that the southeast continent doesn't bulge out there so much would also give you a bit more freedom of motion. Note that there's no issue with the continents overlapping with the original position of the rift, so long as they don't overlap with the current position of the mid-ocean ridge.

      Other than that, it can sometimes take a fair bit of tweaking to get everything to work right (and not getting too worried if there's a bit of bunching here and there). A slight bit of rotation of splitting plates can have a surprisingly large impact on where the mid-ocean ridge between them ends up. You may also sometimes find that in cases like this, you have to move all three plates before everything works out, rather than any two alone.

      Delete
  19. Good day, thanks to you i have been playing with Gplates a lot for a while!
    The thing is I have been trying to make my own fantasy map, in this case an alien planet bigger than Earth, with its own continents, tectonic history and all but i have had my issues.
    First and foremost, the movement of my plates, or features. It is there a way to control the movement of my plates in such a way that they move at the right distance, at the right velocity? I know how to shift poles, but sometimes happened that i move my plates at the speed corresponding to an "Active Margin Continent" (and since my planet's size is around 1.2 times bigger than earth i used a speed of around 2.5 cm/s in this particular case), but sometimes gplates reads lower velocities than expected, driving me to move my plates even more, just to match the speed. I don't know if its something related to the distance from the pole my plates shift or not, and if its there a "rule of thumb" about how to use this tool. In regards to simply moving my plates according to the angle of movement, how does this works if my plates move too close to the "enabled pole"?
    Also, for a plate with the velocity corresponding to "Recent Subduction Collision", should i use it only for the last 50 million years before said plate collides to another continent?
    Cheers!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It can be tricky because different parts of the same plate will necessarily be moving at different linear speeds just because of how the spherical geometry works out. I don't know exactly how Gplates determines its plate velocities, I assume it's some kind of average. So long as your plate motion is decently smooth and regular, I wouldn't get too caught up double-checking the exact measurement of plate velocities every time.

      The "Recent subduction collision" is based on current motion of India if I remember right, so yeah that would be at the end of the collision; but again, it's a rough guideline, because this whole process is necessarily a bit imprecise and is not really intended to be a literal depiction of all the fairly complex processes plate tectonics.

      Delete
  20. Wow, great tutorial. I'm just wondering, let's say you spend a while getting a distribution of continents that you really like and only after having the final continents done do you decided where the North and South poles should be. Can you decide the positions of North and South at the end when creating your images, or does this need to be fixed from the beginning? If so, can you rotate every feature in the simulation at the start so they start in the places that give your desired end result?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Create a new plate id without any objects in it and specify some rotation at 0 ma, then in the program set that plate id as the anchored plate (under the "reconstruction" menu). The rotation of that plate is now, in effect, applied to everything else in reverse. You can even create a new object with that id in gplates and use the rotation tools on it, which should basically just move everything else around it so you can decide on the exact orientation. Just make sure when you're done that you go back into the rotation file and set it to one rotation rather than changing over time.

      Delete
    2. So I'm trying to do the same thing, but don't fully understand what you mean. Do you create a new plate id in the rotation file? Is there a way to do it in GPlates itself? Tried adding a new line for a plate id in my rotation file, specified that new id as the anchor, and all that it did was have everything snap back to my original supercontinent at the beginning of the simulation.

      Delete
    3. New plates always have to be made in the rotation file, they have to be made with at least 2 lines, for their start and end positions, and the altered rotation file has to be reloaded in the "manage feature collections" window in gplates for it to take effect. I don't quite get what you're describing in the last sentence or what would cause something like that.

      Delete
  21. This is an amazing tutorial thanks. I just ran into a wired bug with Gplates and figured I would post it here seeing as there is very little support for Gplates online. As I reloaded my .gproj file by clicking on it in the location where I saved it, I noticed that the location of my cursor did not match the image of my cursor on the screen. For example, if I wanted to click on a vertex I had to have the image of my cursor above and to the right of the vertex before it would highlight and let me move it. I fixed this by opening gplates by clicking on the .exe file and then using the file-open project to load my project file I was working on. This fixed the mouse issue.

    Is this a common bug that you know about, or is a wired bug with my particular set up? I figured I would post it here just in case other world builders run into the same issue.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Further update: it is definitely a wired bug. If I open the saved .gproj file it opens on my second monitor and has the wired bug. If I turn off the second monitor and open the .gproj file it does not have the bug.

      Delete
  22. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  23. Great tutorial, but I have some questions. My timeline reversed itself, I now start of att 0Ma en have to scroll to the right to 2000, it started off the other way around. Is there a way to reverse this?
    I'm having trouble with the flowline when I subduct ocean. In the tutorial, the flowlines stop following Continent A, mine don't do this and the flowlines begin to look strange as a result.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I've never heard of anyone reversing the timeline like this but there should be a "configure animation" option somewhere in the menu that'll let you adjust the timeline.

      Flowlines are generally kinda unreliable, you may have to get used to deleting and remaking them fairly frequently, and paying careful attention to the plate ids you use.

      Delete
  24. Hi, am currently worldbuilding a realistic fantasy world and i already have maps of areas and continents that i am happy with the results. Is there a way to use gplates in revers and or guarantee that i get the results i have already made.
    For more info i have placed rift valleys decided techtonic plates and there movement and mountain chains and there type i am just curious how the history would be and what other implications might arias.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You could maybe try to run the process backwards, but you'd have to take a pretty different approach which would probably take longer and kind of the main point of the process is to produce your continents and terrain so it'd be kind of redundant.

      Delete
  25. Hi iam currently trying to do my own world and encountered a wierd issue. I try to make Craton700 Follow Craton 800 instead of 100 after a rifting event. However after hitting ctrl+P and reading the position of 800 during my time of rifting and inserting it into the rotation file, Craton700 just jumps to the left double the amount of the third digit. I have no clue what is happening since all other cratons i made to unfollow and follow another one worked fine.

    700 0.0 90.0 0.0 0.0 100 ! end CratonG
    700 1.0 73.0671 -156.767 -41.9577 800 ! Drift Correction
    700 850.0 73.0671 -156.767 -41.9577 800 ! start following 800
    700 850.0 90.0 0.0 0.0 100 ! end following100
    700 1000.0 90.0 0.0 0.0 100 ! start CratonG

    This is the line in my rotation file, i double and triple checked the positions and they are correct, the ctrl+p menu is also set to the right time (850) and the other number is 0. When i reload the file with the lines above, and open the ctrl+p menu again, 700 is suddenly at 73.0671 -156.767 -83.9154

    I really hope you can help me, otherwise i am really stuck

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Copying one plate's position to another saves time sometimes but only works in specific circumstances. The more reliable approach here would be to set 800 as the anchored plate and read 700's position relative to it immediately prior to rifting.

      Delete
    2. How can i read 700s position relative to it at the rift ? i used the menu under ctr+p to see where 700 is located at the time of rifting and it got me that error. It also turnes out, setting the angle of 700 to 0.0 fixed the problem of the craton jumping around when i set it to follow 100 instead of 800. I tried it out with my other cratons where i switched from following one to another with the same issue and this also fixed it. I am not sure why tho

      Delete
  26. Hi, how do I handle the subduction zones in ocean crust? What I mean is when two of my ocean crusts collide I dont know how to advance, where do I draw the subduction line?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Ocean-ocean convergence only ever really happens as a result of subduction so I'm not totally sure what you mean.

      Delete
  27. Hi, I have a comment about the Subducting Oceanic Crust chapter. You put the island arc on the the side of Continent A which means that the oceanic crust with plate id 101 is subducting, but i think it should be the other way around as the crust with plate id 101 is younger and hotter and therefore less dense where as the crust with plate id 100 is older and colder and thus more dense. The island arc should therefore be on the other side of the subduction zone.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The idea is that the subduction zone has gradually spread out from the one along the coast, which can lead to the subduction of newer crust by older crust (as the newer crust is being pulled down by the already-subducted crust). You still probably wouldn't expect it to strike out so dramatically into the middle of the ocean like this, but I've fudged things a bit to make the scenario a bit simpler for the following collision steps.

      Delete
  28. Amazing tutorial! Came over from Artifexian's videos, and recently ran into a problem regarding changing the parent plate of a conjugate plate. Whenever I try to specify any plate id besides 0 as the anchored plate, all plate coordinates besides the anchored one show up as "indeterminate pole". The rotation file doesn't seem to be the issue.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. "Indeterminate Pole" is what shows up if the plate hasn't been rotated at all relative to its parent. You can treat it as equivalent to a rotation of 90.0 0.0 0.0

      Delete
  29. Hi, I have a problem with the reconstruction pole and rotation file, as they wont move the plates I selected. I think a part of the problem is that the file is "read only".

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Nvm, I brute forced it, but How do I get cratons to move with another craton, do I just add conjugate ID to the lsit of features?

      Delete
  30. Despite many different searches on google, reddit, and reading the tutorials on the gplates website, I cannot fing out how one would go about creating a new oceanic plate similar to the Pacific. I've found a lot of fascinating articles about how the pacific may have formed but nothing to help me in recreating something similar for my world.

    I can't seem to think of a way to preserve age of crust and also the correct shape and spreading unless i organize the new plate under tree different ones in my rot file. Is there an easier method or guide you can point me too?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Right, so, if you have 3 plates pulling apart with a triple junction of rifts between then, under normal circumstances in each timestep you'd move the 3 plates apart and then fill in new ocean crust between them. You'll have flowlines or a mid-ocean ridge object to guide you for the boundaries between each pair of plates, but at the triple junction itself you'll just have to extrapolate and draw out your existing 3 rifts to meet at a new position for the junction (or something to that effect in the way you mark in the new sections of ocean crust).

      If you want to introduce a new pacific-like plate, then rather than drawing out those rifts all the way to meeting at a single junction, you can instead leave a gap between them, and then draw in a new section of ocean crust within that gap that you assign to a new plate id. The new plate should be roughly triangular, with the center about where the triple junction would have been otherwise and the points towards each of the surrounding rifts, but other than that it's pretty much up to you exactly how big it is and how it's shaped.

      Once you've made that plate, you can proceed in future timesteps as normal, just now with 4 plates divided by 6 rifts (the 3 old rifts plus new ones between the new plate and each old plates) meeting at 3 triple junctions.

      Delete
  31. This is such an amazing resource, thank you thank you! I've been reading through your posts and slowing making my way through. I do have a question, though: Is it worth keeping everything in GPlates rather low-poly, sketching out the broad shapes and rift lines to then refine and detail the finished results say, in GIMP, or is it worth going into detail now at this early worldbuilding stage in GPlates?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I would definitely recommend doing all the refinement outside GPlates, it's just not a very good drawing program. My newest post, Part VIIc, is an overview of how I go about refining my gplates sketch into more detailed terrain, and you wouldn't have to follow the whole process, but the first step includes some tricks to minimize the amount of distortion you have to worry about when drawing on flat maps.

      Delete
    2. That's lifesaving, thank you! :) (GPlates is so fiddly to "draw" on, yeah D:) It does seem to be evident there is some distortion going back and forth between equirectangular and orthographic projections, so I look forward to reading those steps in more detail. Time to roll on with the big, rough blocks!

      Delete
  32. For some reason if I try to make a new feauture collection, it allways says this error mesage:
    An error occurred while saving the file '/Cratons.gpml':
    ErrorOpeningFileForWritingException: Error opening file '/Cratons.gpml' for writing
    Call stack trace:
    (/Users/gplates/gplates/builds/2.3/src/file-io/GpmlOutputVisitor.cc, 542)

    ReplyDelete
  33. Hey, uhh I've been running into a problem with the land raster. see, when I add my continents layer to the reconstructed polygons it just disappears but when I do it with the cratons layer it works just fine. What's going on?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. And this seems to only apply to the first supercontinent.

      Delete
    2. This only really happens when you have a single very large feature, my guess is that when it extends far enough around the planet, gplates just can't quite work out what's inside or outside the polygon anymore. Usually the first rift will break it into small enough pieces that this stops happening.

      Delete
    3. Thanks, that explains it.

      Delete
  34. Firstly, I'd just like to say that this is a great tutorial and I've had no problem following any of the steps. There is, however, one thing that I'm a little confused about.

    My understanding is that, if we're talking about step one of the process with subduction zones around a supercontinent, the continents should move around 3cm a year. The tutorial seems to indicate that this should be a movement of 3cm compared against where the rift is, but I was under the impression that this was relative to the continent it's moving away from?

    For example, in my world I'm making, I have a split occur at 1000Ma and then another at 990Ma. I've saved their rotation at this time and confirmed the velocity with the kinematics tool at around 3cm a year; however, when I compare this to the distance between the continents, they're actually 646km apart. I did a quick real-world estimate and looked at NA and Africa - they split around 170Ma / 150Ma ago from what I can see, and they're about 5800km apart - if we took the generous estimate of 170Ma, then this would be a movement of around 340km a year.

    Maybe I'm overthinking it, but I'd just like to make sure that I'm not misunderstanding. I'd rather find out I'm doing it wrong near the start where I have a chance of fixing it than at the end where it might end up being a redo.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. 340km every 10Ma, sorry - my head has been frazzled trying to work this out, ha.

      Delete
    2. The main limitation on the speed of continent movement is drag on the crustal root by the mantle, which we can treat as more-or-less static as a whole (relative to Earth's rotating reference frame), equivalent to the "static" rotation frame that Gplates measures speed against); whether or not the other continent is moving doesn't really matter much once they've fully rifted apart. Because Africa is mostly surrounded by divergent boundaries, it isn't really moving much, so the rate of the Atlantic's growth is basically solely due to the movement of the Americas (because of this Africa is actually often used as a "static" point of reference for deep-time reconstructions of plate motion, because it's easier to find ways to measure the relative motion of continents in the past rather than any of their motion relative to the interior).

      It also perhaps bears mentioning that plates aren't necessarily going to be terribly consistent in their speed of motion.

      Delete
    3. Thanks for the quick response. I guess I'm just being a bit panicky because everything's been going much easier than I expected - there are too many variables in real world examples for them to be useful for comparison. I guess I could stand to slow my movement down a bit, but, as I'm just trying to get an end product, I can always justify any speeds between time stamps as long as they remain consistent relative to each other.

      Delete
  35. Thanks for the great tutorial! I'm about 300 Ma in my current simulation and it's going pretty well except for one issue. I've tried avoiding it by nudging here and there but I'm currently in a state where I can't find a way around it and I need to handle it somehow. The issue is, what have I done wrong when the oceanic crust "wants" (for lack of a better term) to move over a mid-ocean ridge?

    I'll give you my current predicament as an example:
    Continent CGH has been moving roughly eastward for a while now after breaking off from Continent EF (moving northeast) and Continent B (moving southeast), creating a fairly large ocean crust behind it, now wider than the continent itself. The other continents are not relevant to this issue. Now a subduction zone forms behind Continent CGH, mostly along the coast in the fairly old ocean crust there, Splitting the Continent into C and GH respectively where C is now 'heading' back west. The big ocean crust that was trailing CGH will now be subducted under C at a fairly high rate which will keep moving it eastward faster than before. However, its most recent parts to the north and south near the respective mid-ocean ridges would basically just 'run over' those ridges with the ocean crust's now increased speed. Can that really happen? Or does that mean that I need to add more subduction zones somewhere? Where in that case, I mean I can't place a subduction zone right in a mid-ocean ridge, right? Should I basically add one that splits the ocean crust down the middle and have it 'collapse in on itself' a bit?

    ReplyDelete
  36. Hello again WB Pasta! I previously asked you about plate velocity. Now I have a couple of doubts about island arcs. First, can I try making island arcs one by one, using the same feature type?
    Second, at what distance from the subduction zone from the coats does it forms an island arc between the two, instead of an orogeny on the continent?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The sole purpose of the island arc features is to help you track where these features are forming, and maybe make a tectonic history animation look nicer, so it's entirely up to you how you want them to look; I know some people basically just draw in lines without bothering with anything more natural-appearing.

      For the second question, perhaps something like the width of the continental shelf would make sense, but there's going to be an ambiguous region where islands initially form offshore but eventually grow enough to merge with the mainland. You also have to consider shifts in sea level and possible shifts in the position of the subduction zones as the crust between it and the mainland compresses or stretches depending on circumstances; these boundaries aren't really as static or simple as shown here and you should get caught up thinking of everything as a direct, literal representation of all tectonic activity going on on your planet.

      Delete
    2. Hello there, I have tried making the flowlines on my world in G-Plates and even followed your steps to making them, but every time that I have tried, the lines go bezerk the moment that it even hit 1 million years. I have no idea why that is the case. (It worked on some of the others but not this one).

      Delete
  37. (Sorry about the repeat, did not mean to reply but here is the comment)

    Hello there, I have tried making the flowlines on my world in G-Plates and even followed your steps to making them, but every time that I have tried, the lines go bezerk the moment that it even hit 1 million years. I have no idea why that is the case. (It worked on some of the others but not this one).

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. https://www.flickr.com/photos/194933949@N05/53114853734/in/dateposted-public/
      Here is the photo. (I was the anonymous there) and, as you could tell, they are jus going all over the place and I did the continents first before anything else. B the way, I was trying to make a "spread zone" between the big red craton (near the bright pink one to your right-hand edge) and the big peach/pink one (which is the parent ID). I have no idea why it is doing this.

      Delete
    2. At 1 million years specifically? That's expected, it's the result of various oddities in the way gplates handles data and my workarounds of them. The idea is that you should run your whole animation well before 1 mya (I recommend starting at 2000 for most cases on the assumption you'll run it out for about 500-1000 million years)

      Delete
    3. Nope, actually started at 300 million years (as oceanic crust is no older than that) and the age is 4.5 billion years. I did the continental moments first before doing anything else and this apparently happened exactly 1 million years after.

      But, I think I figured out some sort of solution for myself. I made a new project that starts at the break-up (I.e 330 mya) and copied the cratons and gave them new ID's (although they are kinda the same in shape), along with the continents. I added the flow lines to the first break-up (doing the same process) and kept them until the next break-up, of which I add new oceanic crust, added a "rift" to where the flowlines are and deleted the flowlines. Rinse and repeat.

      After that, I was thinking about having moving oceanic crust with independent ID's, but I am not sure if I had to do the same thing here. The reasoning as to why I would make oceanic crust with their own ID'S is to have some sort of oceanic plateau strike the subduction zone and do the "Ontong-Java/Caribbean" thing where it would do a weird thing. Here is and article about it:
      https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-022-00380-2#:~:text=One%20widely%20cited%20conceptual%20model,buoyant%20block%20at%20the%20trench.
      Although, it might be a little too complex for anyone doing G-plates, but it is interesting.

      Delete
  38. thank for tuturial, i was wondering how can i make a pacific ocean plate analog on gplates?

    ReplyDelete
  39. Have you read about a "deformation" feature on GPlates? It makes use of topologies and it tracks the behaviour of points, with it you can predict things like compression/stretching of the plate, crust thickness, etc.

    https://youtu.be/8y1FpB4eUII?si=TnBzDQ1u9tpgcbZg&t=2195

    At 40:48, he shows the result of "Crust Thickness" calculation; could we use such results to infer the location and size of orogenies? As in, higher thickness imply higher mountains? I wonder if this kind of feature is way more trouble than it is usefull, though.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I think your latter instinct is probably right, to get this to work accurately you'd have to go into much finer detail on the many little crustal blocks that shift around during collisions. Better to treat the process as sort of an abstraction of the tectonic history to give you an idea of where the orogenies will be and then use your intuition--or just artisitic interpretation--to decide exactly how tall they end up being

      Delete
  40. What would be the recommended timescale/landmass if you were doing from the most recent supercontinent e.g. Pangaea style to present day?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The breakup of pangea began roughly 200 million years ago so I guess that

      Delete
    2. If you were going to do similar to that based on 50 MYA cycles as per the tutorial would that mean the average speeds would be different?

      Delete
    3. Don't really see why they would be but it may be beneficial to use shorter timesteps for so short a run

      Delete
  41. Hey, so with the tectonic simulation you made for Artifexian, how did you make that pacific plate at around 1650 Ma?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I get asked this a lot and I think people imagine it's more complicated than it is: If you have 3 plates pulling apart, the 3 mid-ocean ridges will necessarily also move apart each timestep to leave a gap between them. Usually you just extend out the existing ridges so that they all meet at a point again, but to add a new plate you instead make a triangle of new ridges in the gap linking together the existing ridges, with each of those ridges between one of the existing plates and a new plate

      Delete
  42. So, just a small gripe about the importing thing, how do you determine which folder the band files go (if you can that is)?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You can import them from anywhere, and gplates will make an associated file in the same directory, I just recommend keeping all the gplates files in one folder for convenience

      Delete
    2. Do the png files need to be in the same spot?

      Delete
    3. Again, they can be anywhere, but if they're somewhere else and you move around files in the future they gplates project might lose track of them.

      Delete
    4. So, in a similar vein with technical stuff, can you move features to different collections?

      Delete
    5. Not directly but I think when you copy a feature you are given the option to put it in a different feature collection, or you can copy the geometry and make a new feature. Feature collections can also be moved between projects by loading in the collection in the feature collection management window.

      Delete
  43. Hi, firstly thanks for such a helpful guide. I have a question regarding the collision of two subducting oceanic plates; lets say on collision plate A subducts below plate B, what happens to any island arcs that are on plate A that do not have any collisions with other landforms?

    Do these island arcs effectively disappear as they are attached to the plate now being pushed under plate B or do they become inactive volcanic islands and are now subject to following plate B?

    I basically have a few of these island arcs that are subducted but very unlikely to collide with any land and I am unsure how they should associate with the plate that subducted them.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The exact mechanisms vary but the short version is the continental crust in the island arc mostly survives and accretes onto the overriding plate, but with substantial deformation (so overall material survives but not individual islands) and subduction continues as before. There is presumably also an island arc there so the collision will form larger islands, potentially even small continents. If you look at the example sequence I did for the main tectonics tutorial, particularly in the Marshian around 300-250 mya, I had some colliding island arcs there forming a fairly substantial landmass.

      Delete
  44. Hello, I'm hoping someone might be able to help solve a problem I'm having with some of my plate movements.

    I'm at a point in my reconstruction where I'm trying to break off a micro continent that's being dragged towards a subduction zone. I have no issue with it moving forward beyond the point of creation (800Ma), but prior to that, anything assigned as 301 appears in a completely different area of the globe. I've applied 300 as the reconstruction pole and taken the figures for 301, but I'm assuming I should be using some different coordinates to get it to 'attach' where it should be, as the objects do move around on the globe at the same pace as 300. I've attached my rotation file and a couple of screenshots showing the equivalent rotations - on 800 you can see highlighted in green where it should be compared to where it is, and on 799 you can see that it is where it should be and that it's started to move.

    300 0.0 90.0 0.0 0.0 100 ! Craton C end
    300 1.0 2.7032 -162.6181 -81.5494 000 ! Drift correction
    300 750.0 2.4127 -151.0893 -94.048 000 !
    300 800.0 2.7032 -162.6181 -81.5494 000 !
    300 850.0 4.164 -159.8891 -58.8111 000 !
    300 900.0 10.9515 -156.136 -41.068 000 !
    300 950.0 20.8918 -148.4604 -19.6978 000 !
    300 990.0 3.0536 -117.216 -2.9539 000 ! Start moving independently
    300 990.0 90.0 0.0 0.0 100 ! End following A
    300 1000.0 90.0 0.0 0.0 100 ! Craton C start
    301 0.0 90.0 0.0 0.0 000 !
    301 1.0 54.7933 -173.3958 -7.0714 000 ! Drift Correction
    301 790.0 54.7933 -173.3958 -7.0714 000 !
    301 800.0 90.0 0.0 0.0 000 ! Start moving independently
    301 800.0 2.7032 -162.6181 -81.5494 300 ! End following C
    301 1000.0 2.7032 -162.6181 -81.5494 300 ! Micro 1 start

    Recon @ 800: https://ibb.co/tX4hnLg
    Recon @ 799: https://ibb.co/gjbSfK9

    Hopefully I've just misunderstood something in the tutorials and it's an easy fix. Many thanks.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You've entered -81.5 for the 3rd rotation parameter at 800 there but based on your screenshot it should be positive 81.5

      Delete
    2. Ha, I was so blind to all the numbers I didn't click that it changed from positive to negative between the two screenshots. Thanks very much, everything's how it should be now!

      Delete
  45. I'm having a problem where, after moving a plate a certain distance around the world, gplates will "take a shorter path" so rotation part of the code goes from like [0° to 180+°] to [-180 to 0°]. This doesn't actually change anything normally, but when I have some feature like flowlines or a mid ocean ridge following the plate based on half stage rotation, this causes it to flip around to the other side of the world. Is there a way to stop this?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Honestly not one I've encountered before. Maybe just before it flips, copy the geometry and make a new object starting at that point?

      Delete
    2. That's what I've been doing, it's just annoying to deal with. It's the same issue this guy is having- https://discourse.gplates.org/t/rotation-file-error-stage-rotation-takes-long-path/731

      Delete
  46. For some reason, when I add flowlines and do the Add points in the properties window the button is greyed out after the first one. The first time I do it, it works just fine. The flowlines work how they're supposed to. If I save, close it out, open it back up, I can then add another set. Do you have any idea why it would be doing that?

    Thank you for the great guide!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. In terms of the adding times bit? If you're adding several flowlines objects in a row, it'll often remember the times you added, and it's greyed out just to indicate that you already have times. If you want the same time range, then you don't have to do anything; if you do want to change them, then you should be able to scroll down in the properties list and find a "times" parameter you can select and edit.

      Delete
    2. Oh. Yep. That is correct. I was trying way too hard to fix a problem that wasn't there. Thank you for getting back to me!

      Delete
  47. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  48. Hello! I'm coming from Artifexian video on using topological sections but I'm kinda stuck since he doesn't mention what happens when continents collide and plate subduct for example. I tried this and my mid ocean ridges and divergent topos are just all over the place. I'm wondering if you may know why this could be the case?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Topology objects are really tricky and labor-intensive to do properly, you kinda just need to spend some time learning the rules for how gplates links objects together to make a topology and then, if you want a continuous animation, go through your history frame-by-frame (i.e. every million years after your start point) and make sure those rules are met for each frame, which often means making multiple topologies for the same boundary to cover different age ranges and adjusting the underlying objects so that they overlap exactly when they should to control a topology passing across them; I'm pretty sure there are points in the gplates sequence I did for artifexian where there are topologies being replaced every frame.

      Delete
    2. Thanks, and wow I see what you mean by tedious! I'm actually restarting my project because I thought the original supercontinent was a bit too small for my liking (is was 13% of the world). What would be a good ballpark for how much land I should have at the start?

      Delete
    3. I've been finding I tend to increase land area by a few % of global area over a ~6-800 million year run, so I suppose start a few percantage points less of your intended final result, though the results may vary depending on how aggressively you add lands in island arc collisions and push continents into each other when they collide.

      Delete
  49. I have a quick question on importing a map back into Gplates. When you export with a custom central meridian (70.0 in my case) and then wish to import the map as a raster, how do you modify the map import such that its raster is back to 0.0 and not cutting off the sides of the map?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Either use g.projector to export your map in an equirectangular (oblique) projection offset 70 degrees back west, or you can just use an image editor to cut off the right edge of your map and paste it on the left side; in equirectangular projection, longitude lines are equally spaced, so it would be 70/360 = 19.444...% of the width of your map you'd need to move

      Delete
  50. Hi so this is really cool! but I've been having some problems with the .rot file, as whenever I add it to GPlates, theres some error. This is what I have and it is telling me: Line 1 [4; 4] Error reading latitude. Does anyone know the problem?
    100 0.0. 90.0 0.0 0.0 000 ! Craton A end
    100 1000.0 90.0 0.0 0.0 000 ! Craton A start
    200 0.0 90.0 0.0 0.0 000 ! Craton B end
    200 1000.0 90.0 0.0 0.0 000 ! Craton B start
    300 0.0 90.0 0.0 0.0 200 ! Craton C end
    300 1000.0 90.0 0.0 0.0 200 ! Craton C start (Follow B)
    400 0.0 90.0 0.0 0.0 200 ! Craton D end
    400 1000.0 90.0 0.0 0.0 200 ! Craton D start (Follow B)
    500 0.0 90.0 0.0 0.0 200 ! Craton E end
    500 1000.0 90.0 0.0 0.0 200 ! Craton E start (Follow B)
    600 0.0 90.0 0.0 0.0 100 ! Craton F end
    600 1000.0 90.0 0.0 0.0 100 ! Craton F start (Follow A)
    700 0.0 90.0 0.0 0.0 000 ! Craton G end
    700 1000.0 90.0 0.0 0.0 000 ! Craton G start
    800 0.0 90.0 0.0 0.0 200 ! Craton H end
    800 1000.0 90.0 0.0 0.0 200 ! Craton H start (Follow B)
    900 0.0 90.0 0.0 0.0 700 ! Craton I end
    900 1000.0 90.0 0.0 0.0 700 ! Craton I start (Follow G)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Looks like you have an extra period after the first 0.0.

      Delete
    2. Hi, I'm working with gplates 2.4 on windows, and I'm trying to rotate the plates, but after I've moved it, pressed "apply" and "ok", the plate stays in the same place it was before, even if the rotation file updated as if the position actually changed.

      Delete
  51. (sorry, I mistakenly wrote this in a reply)
    Hi, I'm working with gplates 2.4 on windows, I'm trying to rotate the plates, but after I've moved it, pressed "apply" and "ok", the plate stays in the same place it was before, even if the rotation file updated as if the position actually changed.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. First guess that I'd have is checking times carefully to make sure that you're not doing something weird there. Maybe check to make sure that the plate isn't following another one. Not sure what happens if you do that, but I could see it possibly preventing movement. If not those, you'd probably need to check with someone more experienced. Hope this helps.

      Delete
    2. Thank you very much for your answer. In the end my problem was simply a mistake I made in the rotation file, I've just fixed it. Thank you again, I really appreciate what you are doing on this blog.

      Delete
  52. Hi love your tutorial, was wondering how I can go about splitting former orogenies since they change colour as they get older and making a new geometry restarts the change in black to white

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You would want to make two new features with the same age as the original but with new plate ids. If you're concerned with the appearance throughout the history being sensible, this can involve some tricky plate id juggling; my habit as of late is to, rather than switching terranes from one id to another during rifts, create a new id which follows one continent up to the rift and the other after (so e.g. if two continents with ids of 200 and 300 collide and then rift apart at 500 Ma with part of continent 200 ending up staying with continent 300, I can make a new id 201 which follows continent 200 (just setting it as the anchor id with standard 90 0 0 rotation) until 500 Ma, then follows 300 afterwards (setting anchor id to 300 and using the rotation of 200 relative to 300 at 500 Ma) and assign the swapped terrain to plate 201); that way when making orogenies and LIPs I can just assign the former orogeny section to that new plate (plate 201 in that example).

      Delete
    2. Ok thank you, I got a major rifting event at 2.5 Ga so thank you

      Delete
  53. So I've been following along the tutorial, but I have an issue when I try to do the second rift, I can't get one of my crayons to follow the one I need, and alot of thie time it ends up teleworking randomly ro the left or right by a couple 100km and I'm sure why, would you possibly consider doing an example of splitting co moving continents with multiple cratons

    ReplyDelete
  54. Hey great tutorial! I have an issue with GPlates, been working on splitting some crust to preserve the time but whenever I change the plate ID it moves which it hasn't done before. Any fix?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular Posts