EarthByte Earth Seafloor Crustal Age
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
You access a global crustal age grid by specifying the special name
@earth_age[_rru[_reg]]
The following codes for rru and the optional reg are supported (dimensions and sizes are listed for pixel-registered grids; gridline-registered grids increment dimensions by one):
Code
Dimensions
Reg
Size
Description
01d
360 x 180
g,p
73 KB
1 arc degree global seafloor ages (1 min @ 315 km)
30m
720 x 360
g,p
204 KB
30 arc minute global seafloor ages (1 min @ 157 km)
20m
1080 x 540
g,p
401 KB
20 arc minute global seafloor ages (1 min @ 105 km)
15m
1440 x 720
g,p
658 KB
15 arc minute global seafloor ages (1 min @ 79 km)
10m
2160 x 1080
g,p
1.3 MB
10 arc minute global seafloor ages (1 min @ 52 km)
06m
3600 x 1800
g,p
3.0 MB
6 arc minute global seafloor ages (1 min @ 32 km)
05m
4320 x 2160
g,p
4.6 MB
5 arc minute global seafloor ages (1 min @ 26 km)
04m
5400 x 2700
g,p
5.8 MB
4 arc minute global seafloor ages (1 min @ 21 km)
03m
7200 x 3600
g,p
11 MB
3 arc minute global seafloor ages (1 min @ 16 km)
02m
10800 x 5400
g,p
18 MB
2 arc minute global seafloor ages (1 min @ 11 km)
01m
21600 x 10800
g
50 MB
1 arc minute global seafloor ages (1 min original)
Note that resolutions 05m and higher are tiled. See Remote Data Sets for more information.
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 dataset (@earth_age.cpt) will be used.
Technical Information
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 Myr 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
Seton et al., 2020: [https://doi.org/10.1029/2020GC009214].