Hello,

from the 2003 article An updated digital model of plate boundaries by Peter Bird I extracted the data for

• names of the earth's tectonic plates;
  
• plate boundaries with classification as oceanic spreading ridge, oceanic transform fault, oceanic convergent boundary, continental rift boundary, continental transform fault or continental convergent boundary; and
  
• Euler rotation poles and rotation speeds for all plates.
  

Here is an example of the data set in action:


I found this model very useful for my studies in Geophysics from time to time. It is somewhat more detailed and accurate than a model that was posted earlier on this forum in the thread Earth's tectonic plates, which is quite nice as well

cu,
Thomas Chust

That is impressive. How do you do something like that? Do you use Google Earth free or Google Earth Plus?

Help > contents > will get you to a very good tutorial that you can access from the viewer.
From that You can find information like the following:

Quote:

---

The Google Earth application offers a number of tools that you can use to measure distances and estimate sizes. Depending upon which version of Google Earth you are using, you have access to the following measuring and drawing tools:

Measuring with a line or path (all Google Earth versions)

Measuring area or circle radius (Google Earth PRO)

Drawing a path or polygon shape in the 3D viewer (Google Earth PLUS and Google Earth PRO)

---

Thanks for bringing this great post up from the depths. Sometimes they get buried before I see them. This folder contains some very good information about plate tectonics.

Hill, thanks for your answer. This community is really incredible.

I'm trying to see if I'm somehow able to recreate how to draw these lines. I am using Google Earth free version. And I know I can measure lines or path, but then I don't know how to save them in order to be able to retrieve them as a .kmz file.

I believe this kind of work like the file posted in this thread it's done on KML directly. I don't write or read KML yet (I'm just learning since today) and I would like to know if there is any way, even if it is not as precise as this work, to do this without writing a large KML file.

Once again thanks for your answer. I have been reading all kind of tutorials, help, etc. from the Google Earth Community. There is a lot to learn, but is very exciting.

I hope to learn enough to start helping others as you do.

Thanks,

Hello,

sorry for getting back to you that late. I'm a little busy these days :-(

Here's what I did to create the model: I use the free version of Google Earth, so there are not that many editing tools available in the GUI. Besides, I don't think I would have wanted to draw all the plate boundaries by hand. Therefore, apart from reading the standard documentation of Google Earth, I also peeked into the developer documentation, especially the one on the KML format and then decided to do most of the work by transforming the original polygon data of Peter Bird's plate boundaries into XML with some Perl scripts.

After the initial conversion I did some hand editing of the KML files, both with a text editor and with the Google Earth GUI, whichever felt more comfortable for the task at hand. For example I started out putting all the things like boundaries, rotation poles, etc. in separate files and then just rearranged them into a folder in the GUI. I also set the viewpoints for each plate from the GUI, because you can just snapshot the view and don't have to do some complicated coordinate calculations by hand. But I think I did some hand optimization of autogenerated styles in a text editor.

One problem I ran across while doing this model is that I would have liked to make some lines dashed, but the only way to do that seemed to be creating small line segments manually. I refrained from that work and made the lines thicker but slightly transparent instead. Apart from that I found Google Earth quite fun to work with also from a programmer's perspective � great piece of software!

I hope you are successful with your own Google Earth experiments. If you find my Perl scripts above useful for yourself, feel free to reuse and/or modify them.

cu,
Thomas

Thank you very much for that answer. It is extremely helpful.

Cunque