EarthByte Global Earth Seafloor Crustal Age

_images/EarthByte_logo_small.png
_images/GMT_age.png

Numerous geodynamic and geophysical studies consider both the seafloor depth and the seafloor crustal age. EarthByte has pioneered the creation of crustal age grids since 1997 and we offer their latest version for remote use in GMT.

Usage - Global Earth Seafloor Crustal Age Grid

You access a global crustal age grid by specifying the special name

@earth_age_rr[u[_reg]]

The following codes for rru and the optional reg are supported (dimensions are listed for pixel-registered grids; gridline-registered grids increment dimensions by one):

Code

Dimensions

Reg

Size

Description

01d

360 x 180

g,p

125 KB

1 arc degree global seafloor ages (1 min @ 111 km)

30m

720 x 360

g,p

402 KB

30 arc minute global relief (1 min @ 55 km)

20m

1080 x 540

g,p

827 KB

20 arc minute global relief (1 min @ 37 km)

15m

1440 x 720

g,p

1.4 MB

15 arc minute global relief (1 min @ 28 km)

10m

2160 x 1080

g,p

2.9 MB

10 arc minute global relief (1 min @ 18 km)

06m

3600 x 1800

g,p

7.3 MB

6 arc minute global relief (1 min @ 10 km)

05m

4320 x 2160

g,p

10 MB

5 arc minute global relief (1 min @ 9 km)

04m

5400 x 2700

g,p

15 MB

4 arc minute global relief (1 min @ 7.5 km)

03m

7200 x 3600

g,p

26 MB

3 arc minute global relief (1 min @ 5.6 km)

02m

10800 x 5400

g,p

56 MB

2 arc minute global relief (1 min @ 3.7 km)

01m

21600 x 10800

g,p

188 MB

1 arc minute global relief (1 min original)

See GMT remote dataset usage for when resolution codes are optional or required. All of these data will, when downloaded, be placed in your ~/.gmt/server directory, with the earth_age files being placed in an earth/earth_age sub-directory. If you do not specify a CPT, the default CPT for this data set will be used (@age_chrons_GTS2012_2020.cpt)

Technical Information - Global Earth Seafloor Crustal Age Grid

We scale and reformat the original data to take up very little space so that downloads from the servers are as fast as possible. For the seafloor crustal age grid this means we chose 0.01 My as the smallest data unit, which is well below the uncertainties in the model. Data are scaled and shifted to fit in a short integer grid that is highly compressed by netCDF lossless compression and chunking. The data are reported in Myr relative to the 2012 Geological Time Scale.

Data References - Global Earth Seafloor Crustal Age Grid

  1. Seton et al., 2020: [http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2020GC009214].