The Precambrian paleogeography of Laurentia

This repository contains a manuscript and associated data and code associated with a book chapter The Precambrian paleogeography of Laurentia that was published in the volume entitled Ancient Supercontinents and the Paleogeography of the Earth (https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-818533-9.00009-6). This chapter focuses on the paleogeography of the Precambrian interior of North American known as Laurentia. The PDF of the paper can be downloaded here: https://github.com/Swanson-Hysell-Group/Laurentia_Paleogeography/raw/master/Manuscript/Laurentia_Paleogeo_Manuscript.pdf

Swanson-Hysell, N. L. (2021) The Precambrian paleogeography of Laurentia. In: Pesonen, L.J., Salminen, J., Evans, D.A.D., Elming, S.-Å., Veikkolainen, T. (eds.) Ancient Supercontinents and the Paleogeography of the Earth. doi:10.1016/B978-0-12-818533-9.00009-6.

The contents of this repository are licensed for reuse under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license.

Manuscript

The .tex source file as well as the compiled manuscript are within this folder.

Figures

The figures incorporated in the manuscript and additional graphical output from the code are within this folder.

Data

The pole compilations as well as the shapefiles associated Laurentia provinces and terranes are within this folder.

Models

Published paleogeographic models as well as the simple Laurentia pole interpolation model developed for this study are within this folder.

Code

The code that conducts the analyses and develops the visualizations for the manuscript are within Jupyter notebooks within this folder. There are four notebooks:

• Laurentia_pole_compilation.ipynb This notebook imports the paleomagnetic poles and calculations and analysis such as the implements the Euler rotations and calculations of paleolatitude. The summary figures of pole position and paleolatitude are developed in this notebook.
• Laurentia_reconstructions_generate.ipynb This notebook uses pygplates to generate reconstructions using the paleogeographic models and shapefiles. It also generates motion path calculations that are plotted along with the paleolatiudes of poles within Laurentia_pole_compilation.ipynb.
• Laurentia_reconstructions_plot.ipynb This notebook plots the reconstructed shapefiles that were generated in the Laurentia_reconstructions_generate.ipynb notebook.
• Laurentia_tectonic_summary.ipynb This notebook develops the tectonic summary figure for the manuscript

The notebooks can be viewed statically at this link: https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/Swanson-Hysell-Group/Laurentia_Paleogeography/tree/master/Code/

The Python 3.7 environment for Laurentia_tectonic_summary.ipynb, Laurentia_pole_compilation.ipynb and Laurentia_reconstructions_plot.ipynb is specified within the laurentia_paleogeography.yml file. If one is using an Anaconda installation of Python, they can create this environment with the following command:

conda env create -f laurentia_paleogeography.yml

Additionally, these notebooks utilize the PmagPy project (https://github.com/PmagPy) which can be installed using pip:

pip install pmagpy

The Laurentia_reconstructions_generate.ipynb notebook uses a Python 2.7 environment as that is required for the use of the pygplates package. That environment can be created using the pygplates.yml file.

conda env create -f pygplates.yml

Additionally, an installation of pygplates is required (www.gplates.org) to run the Laurentia_reconstructions_generate.ipynb notebook.

Reconstructions

Reconstructions that are output from the code are within this folder.