palaeoverse: palaeogeographic reconstruction files

This repository provides access to five pre-computed reconstruction files. This set of palaeogeographic reconstruction files provide palaeocoordinates for H3 resolution 3 which has an average cell spacing of ~119 km. Grids were reconstructed at a temporal resolution of one million years throughout the entire Phanerozoic (540–0 Ma). The reconstruction files are stored as R Data Serialization (RDS) files—a common format for saving R objects—which provide a lighter (and compressed) alternative to the CSV files. The structure of the reconstruction files follows a wide-form data frame structure to ease indexing. Each file consists of three initial index columns relating to the H3 cell index (i.e. the 'H3 address'), present-day longitude of the cell centroid, and the present-day latitude of the cell centroid. The subsequent columns provide the reconstructed longitudinal and latitudinal coordinate pairs for their respective age of reconstruction in ascending order, indicated by a numerical suffix. Each row contains a unique spatial point on the Earth's continental surface reconstructed through time. NA values within the reconstruction files indicate points which are not defined in deeper time (i.e. either the static polygon does not exist at that time, or it is outside the temporal coverage as defined by the rotation file). The following five Global Plate Models are provided (abbreviation, temporal coverage, reference) and file naming follows the nomenclature denoted on the GPlates Web Service: GOLONKA (WR13), 0–550 Ma, (Wright et al., 2013) MATTHEWS2016_pmag_ref (MA16), 0–410 Ma, (Matthews et al., 2016) TorsvikCocks2017 (TC16), 0–540 Ma, (Torsvik and Cocks, 2016) PALEOMAP (SC16), 0–1100 Ma, (Scotese, 2016) MERDITH2021 (ME21), 0–1000 Ma, (Merdith et al., 2021) For more information on how these files were prepared see: Jones, L.A., Domeier, M. A Phanerozoic gridded dataset for palaeogeographic reconstructions. Sci Data 11, 710 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-024-03468-w For further information, contact: [e-mail] If you use these files, please cite: Jones, L.A., Domeier, M. A Phanerozoic gridded dataset for palaeogeographic reconstructions. Sci Data 11, 710 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-024-03468-w