[Tutorial] Using GPlates to model continental drift

[Charerg]

There’s been a number of ambitious world-building projects recently that have attempted to model tectonic movements in a fictional world. One program that is extremely useful in creating a functional tectonic model for this purpose is GPlates, which allows you to model continental drift across time on a globe. As there aren’t any comprehensive GPlates tutorials on the guild, I thought I’d write one.

Note: This isn’t a tutorial about plate tectonics, only about how to use GPlates to model the movements of the continents. To actually figure out which movements make sense and which don’t, you need to familiarise yourself with plate tectonics.

Requirements for this tutorial:
GPlates

GPlates' own user documentary and tutorials:
Link

Before I begin with the tutorial itself, I should note that I’m not going to cover the basic functions of GPlates (like moving the view). However, there are some existent tutorials by Astrographer that cover this, which I recommend:
Using gplates for Realistic Worldbuilding
Continental Drift the gplates Way


Here are the contents of the tutorial planned so far. I’ll probably keep expanding this over time with more sections.

1. Basic functionality: creating and moving continents
   
   a. Creating a continent
   b. Writing a rotation file
   c. Animating the continental drift
   
   
2. Advanced functionality: locating mid-oceanic ridges and creating oceanic crust
   
   a. Creating flowlines
   b. Creating oceanic crust
   c. Colouring the oceanic crust based on age
   
   
3. Advanced functionality: using Motion Paths to trace hotspots
   
   
4. Advanced functionality: checking plate velocity
   
   
5. Advanced functionality: generating a velocity field
   
   
6. Advanced functionality: using conjugate plates

Each section will be posted in a separate post (once it’s been written), and linked to the above table of contents. Without further ado, on to the tutorial itself!