Calculate carbonate sediment thickness

Generate carbonate sediment thickness grids from age and bathymetry grids over the time range 0-170Ma (in 1My increments). Pelagic carbonate sediments did not exist before 170Ma.

Dependencies

• GMT (and make sure the 'gmt' executable is in the PATH).
• PyGPlates.
• PlateModelManager (note that installing GPlately also installs this).
• SciPy.
• And, on Windows platforms, optionally install psutil so that this workflow can use CPU cores in the background (ie, below-normal priority).

Usage

To generate the carbonate thickness grids you can either:

• load the Jupyter notebook carbonate_sediment_thickness.ipynb and run all cells, or
• type python run_carbonate_sediment_thickness.py in a console/terminal window.

In either case there are a bunch of top-level parameters that you can change/configure. By default use_all_cpu_cores is set to True to run on all CPU cores (otherwise it takes too long; up to 25 hours at 0.5 degree resolution using just a single core). Note that you can increase the grid_spacing parameter to reduce the running time.

Note: If you choose the Jupyter notebook and you edit a parameter outside the notebook (such as inside the imported module carbonate_sediment_thickness) then you'll need to restart the notebook kernel after each modification (or insert reload(carbonate_sediment_thickness) after import carbonate_sediment_thickness).

The location of the age and bathymetry will need to be changed to point to your local grids.

The age grids can be downloaded from https://www.earthbyte.org/webdav/ftp/Data_Collections/Muller_etal_2019_Tectonics/Muller_etal_2019_Agegrids/Muller_etal_2019_Tectonics_v2.0_netCDF.zip .

The bathymetry grids can be downloaded from https://www.earthbyte.org/webdav/ftp/Data_Collections/Wright_etal_2020_ESR/Grids/Paleobathymetry_RHCW18/ .

You can either use the supplied topological model (in local directory input_data/topology_model/2019_v2/), or use PlateModelManager to provide one, or provide your own. If you're using the supplied model then you don't need to do anything. If you're using PlateModelManager then you just need to specify the model name (and set using_local_model to False). If you're providing your own model then you'll need to list your rotation and topology files in the rotation_filenames and topology_filenames variables (in carbonate_sediment_thickness.ipynb or run_carbonate_sediment_thickness.py) - and note that you'll likely need to use absolute paths in your filenames (unlike the supplied model).

Reference

Dutkiewicz, A., Müller, R.D., Cannon, J., Vaughan, S. and Zahirovic, S., 2019, Sequestration and subduction of deep-sea carbonate in the global ocean since the Early Cretaceous. Geology, 47(1), pp.91-94. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1130/G45424.1