palaeoverse: palaeogeographic reconstruction files

Palaeogeographic reconstruction files

This set of palaeogeographic reconstruction files provide palaeocoordinates for an equal-area hexagonal grid (~100 km spacings) palaeorotated to the midpoint age of Phanerozoic stages from Geological Time Scale 2020. The palaeocoordinates were generated by rotating the cell centroids of the grid to reconstruction ages via the GPlates Web Service. Reconstruction files are provided for each model available on the GPlates Web Service. The reconstruction files are structured as wide-format dataframes with the first two columns ("lng", "lat") denoting the cell centroid coordinates of the grid, the third column containing the cell index ("cell"), followed by additional columns denoting the palaeolongitude and palaeolatitude for each age of rotation (i.e. "lng_1", "lat_1", ... "lng_535", "lat_535"). Note that NA values in the dataframes denote cell centroids that could not be reconstructed or palaeocoordinates which are equal to their modern coordinates. This may be due to the spatial or temporal coverage of the Plate Rotation Model or the georeferenced plate not existing at time of reconstruction. Files are provided in '.RDS' format which can easily be opened in R or R Studio. File names denote the Global Plate Model used for reconstruction.

Note: the reconstruction files are provided to allow the rapid generation of palaeocoordinates for large datasets and the calculation of palaeogeographic uncertainty metrics via the palaeorotate() function in the palaeoverse R package. While reconstruction files are provided for mantle reference frame models, the use of these for generating palaeocoordinates is not advised. 

For more information contact: LewisA.Jones@outlook.com

If you use these files, please cite: 

Jones, L.A., Gearty, W., Allen, B.J., Eichenseer, K., Dean, C.D., Galván S., Kouvari, M., Godoy, P.L., Nicholl, C., Dillon, E.M., Flannery-Sutherland, J.T., Chiarenza, A.A. 2022. palaeoverse: a community-driven R package to support palaeobiological analyses. EarthArXiv. doi:10.31223/X5Z94Q