ptrotR: Plate Tectonic Rotations in R

ptrotR is a free and open-source R package for analyzing and reconstructing plate motion. It provides:

• import of GPLATES *.rot files: read.gplates()
• interpolate total reconstruction poles between time steps: finite_pole_interpolation()
• extraction of relative plate motion parameters from sequence of total reconstruction poles: extract_stage_rotations()
• a grid of plate motion vectors (incl. azimuth, distance to Euler pole, and absolute velocity): plate_motion_grid()

Prerequisites

You must have R installed on your system (see http://r-project.org). Additionally, to install ptrotR from Github, you also need the devtools package. This can be installed by typing the following code at the R command line prompt:

install.packages("remotes")

Installation

The most recent development version of ptrotR is available from Github and can be installed on your system as follows:

remotes::install_github('tobiste/euler') % requiered package from my repository
remotes::install_github('tobiste/ptrotR')
library('ptrotR')

Example

Import total reconstructions from a GPLATES *.rot file:

fname <- system.file("Pangea.rot", package="ptrotR")
pangea <- read.gplates(fname)
print(pangea)

Extract stage rotations for a specific plate:

stage_pols <- extract_stage_rotations(pangea, plate = 137)

Create a grid of plate motion vectors for a specific stage pole (here first in stage_pols):

vectors <- plate_motion_grid(stage_pols[1,])

% plot the motion vectors:
tectonicr::axes(vectors$lon, vectors$lat, vectors$azimuth, add = FALSE)

Author

Tobias Stephan

Useful references

• Greiner, B. (1999). Euler rotations in plate-tectonic reconstructions. Computers and Geosciences, 25(3), 209–216. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0098-3004(98)00160-5
• Schaeben, H., Kroner, U., & Stephan, T. (2021). Euler Poles of Tectonic Plates. In B. S. Daza Sagar, Q. Cheng, J. McKinley, & F. Agterberg (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Mathematical Geosciences. Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences Series (pp. 1–7). Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26050-7_435-1

• Schaeben, H., Kroner, U., & Stephan, T. (2024). Mathematical fundamentals of spherical kinematics of plate tectonics in terms of quaternions. Mathematical Methods in the Applied Sciences, 47(6), 4469–4496. https://doi.org/10.1002/mma.9823