Course Elective 29 - Introduction to plate reconstruction and spatio-temporal data mining with GPlates
Staff involved:
Prof Dietmar Mueller, Dr Simon Williams and Thomas Landgrebe (EarthByte Research Group, School of Geosciences, The University of Sydney)
Location:
Madsen Building, The University of Sydney, Main Campus, Room TBA.
Background:
GPlates is free desktop software running on Windows, Linux and MacOS X, developed as part of AuScope and associated international collaborations. It enables the interactive manipulation of plate-tectonic reconstructions and the visualization of geodata through geological time. Users can build regional or global plate models, import their own data and digitise features. Raster files images in a variety of formats can be loaded, assigned to tectonic plates, age-coded and reconstructed through geological time. The software also allows the exporting of image sequences for animations or for publication-quality figure generation as vector graphics files. Plates and plate boundaries through time can be visualised over mantle tomography image stacks. GPlates is also designed to enable the linking of plate tectonic models with mantle convection models. The software allows the construction of time-dependent plate boundary topologies as well as exporting plate polygons and velocity time-sequences. Mantle convection model output images can be imported and animated with plate tectonic reconstructions overlain.
Module Objectives:
The course will cover most functions available in GPlates, including introduction to a data mining plugin. Spatio-temporal data mining allows the easy integration and analysis of multidimensional data sets, in a plate tectonic context. A so-called co-registration tool formally relates and associates chosen “seed” features with other datasets to form time-dependent associations. A visual data mining tool (called Orange) is interfaced with GPlates to provide quantitative data mining functionality.
Format, duration and timing:
Day 1: Introduction to plate tectonic theory and to all GPlates functions
Day 2: Building alternative reconstructions of the Rodinia supercontinent
Day 3: Introduction to data mining; integrating multiple datasets spatio-temporally in GPlates via the data coregistration tool; data mining coregistered datasets via the Orange data mining tool, and GPlates plugins
Day 4: Practical quantitative analysis and data mining exercises, e.g. investigating relationships between age-coded mineral-deposits and other data such as Australian Phanerozoic palaeo-depositional environments, faults, and other tectonic structures.
Marked data mining case study exercise.
Assumed knowledge and Getting Ready:
Senior undergraduate year in Sciences.
In preparation for the course download and install the GPlates software from www.gplates.org as well as the user manual, and download the tutorial documents and files from http://www.gplates.org/docs.html. You also need to install the Orange data-mining tool on your computer, found at http://orange.biolab.si/. A GPlates plugin will be provided for the course. You’ll need to bring a laptop computer with all these items installed to participate in the course. If you are a Mac user, you need to run MacOS X 10.5 or later (on an Intel system). If you are a Linux or Windows PC user it is highly recommended to use a PC that is not older than ~3 years. Please visit http://www.gplates.org/download.html for more details on GPlates software versions and minimum requirements.
Module contact persons and coordinators:
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