Research at UTIGActive Projects Archived Projects Climate Continental Margins Earthquake Seismology Energy Gas Hydrate Studies Natural Resource Exploration Neotectonics Planetary Geophysics Plate Boundary Processes Plate Models Polar Studies Quantitive Geophysics Sea-Level Fluctuations |
Research at UTIG Plate ModelsUTIG’s global plate reconstruction project, known as PLATES, is an industry-supported program dedicated to developing software that models past and present tectonic plate movements and geologic environments. PLATES reconstructions are built around a comprehensive database of finite-difference poles of rotation, derived both from extensive plate motion research at UTIG and from published studies. The project’s software allows investigators to group together continents and, in conjunction with user-specified geo-scientific data, move them over the globe with geometric precision. In addition, the software can produce animations of the major plates for the last 600 million years, yielding time-varying tectonic scenarios that enable analyses of evolutionary Earth processes. Ian Dalziel and Lawrence Lawver are the project’s principal investigators. Lawver’s research focuses on the tectonics of the Arctic, Antarctic, and East Asian regions. Much of Dalziel's research aims to determine the previous configurations of the southern continents (Africa, South America, Australia, and Antarctica) which, together with India, were assembled into a single continent known as Gondwana. Lisa Gahagan manages the PLATES software and maintains its database.
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