Pplates

Tectonic reconstruction using deformable and tearable meshes to simulate the behaviour of the Earth's lithospheric plates. Pplates utilises SceneKit and the MacOS metal framework, with orthographic and perspective projections of the Virtual Earth representation of the planet. Perspective enables the user to fly beneath slabs to image the earthquake distribution for example. Calculations "under the hood" in the Pplates math engine now use quaternions, and the rotation of individual mesh objects is calculated, for any specific time, from a collapsed pole sequence. This reduces the overhead for the calculation, and thus enhances interactivity. However, the collapsed pole sequence must be calculated before moving back or forward through time. 3D mesh objects to be mapped to the 2D mesh window and re-associated with texture images.