The idea to start up a blog has been floating around for a while now, and I have finally committed to posting an entry. The first entry is an animation (and snapshots) of plate reconstructions in GPlates (v 1.2) depicting the evolution of the Indo-Australian plates in the context of Gondwana breakup from Cretaceous times.
The animation begins at 200 Ma and is based on a recently-published model by Seton et al. (2012) that you can read about here, and you can download the model for use in GPlates from the EarthByte resources page. The plate reconstructions are global and can be interactive manipulated in GPlates, and can be exported as a series of snapshots (JPG, PNG, BMP) or as other files (Scalable Vector Graphics, ESRI Shapefiles, GMT xy/OGR formats, etc.). The reconstructions show plate boundaries which are dynamic – resulting from polygon topologies resolved at each timestep dynamically from the intersection of individual plate boundaries, a process that is described by Gurnis et al. (2012). Present-day coastlines and topography are reconstructed to give a reference and largely because paleobathymetry/paleotopography models are very uncertain. Plate velocities are also plotted, showing India’s northward advance was very fast compared to the velocities of surrounding plates. Recent research (i.e. van Hinsbern et al. 2012) has suggested that the acceleration of India northward resulted from the combined northward slab pull from Tethyan subduction, but also the northward “plume push” forces derived from the arrival of the Reunion Plume head to the base of Indian/African lithosphere.
The animation itself is more precisely based on the preferred scenario from my first published paper in G-Cubed (Zahirovic et al. 2012) that tests alternative India-Eurasia convergence scenarios using geodynamic models (implemented using GPlates and CitcomS). This preferred scenario has a large back-arc along southern Eurasia, much like the present-day west Pacific, with India first colliding with the associated island arc at ~60 Ma, followed by continent-continent collision and suturing at ~40 Ma.
I am publishing this stuff in a blog largely because I have been meaning to start uploading educational material and other things I find interesting in (geo-) science news for a long time now. It’s also a great opportunity to showcase some of the stuff we do, and the cool software/data we work with.
13 April 2012
geodynamix 
Thanks for the tip to check out Seton et al. It’s great to have a rotation model that goes back to 200 Ma. Now all I need is 50 million years more and I can finish my current project!