Time-dependent rasters
Ádám T. Kocsis 
Other tectonic reconstructions
There are two other tectonic reconstructions that come bundled with GPlates. - The model of Merdith et al. 2021 - and the PALEOMAP model of C. Scotese.
Feel free to explore these models, they are in the GeoData / FeatureCollections / AltPlateReconstructions directory:
The PaleoMAP model
The model of C. Scotese is one of the oldest, and has been developed for decades. You can load in the basic polygons and the rotation file from the directory Scotese_PALEOMAP_GLobalPlateModel. Open PALEOAMP_PlateModel.rot and PALEOMAP_TerranePolygons.gpmlz!
You should see something like, this, for convenience you can turn on the filling of polygons
As you can see, the polygons include the oceanic floor by default - however only for the present-day. If you move back in time, the reconstruction tree will already move the polygons, and for convenience, the oceanic floor is not shown.
This model goes way back in time… and there is a lot of resources built using this model - for instance reconstruction of topographies, which are time-dependent rasters.
The PaleoMAP PaleoDEMs
Using the plate tectonic reconstructions, present-day topography and timing of events in Earth history, C. Scotese created a set of reconstructions of the Earth’s topography since the Cambrian. These are the so-called paleoDigital Elevation Models.
These can be downloaded either from this link or from the official page of the DEMs here. Go on, and download the zip file!
Uncompress this zip file! In Windows 11 you can do this by right-clicking on the zip file in the Windows Explorer and clicking on Extract All!
The default destination should be fine:
click on extract! This wil create a new directory and put all uncompressed files there.
If you go into this directory, you will see a a list of files with .cache and .nc extensions. The .nc files (NetCDF files) include the actual map data. This is a standard binary file format, which is frequently used to store multidimensional (e.g. climate) data.
To import these, go to Gplates and go to File -> Import -> Import Time-Dependent Raster!
Here you need to specify the directory where all the different raster files are. Click on Add directory…!
This opens up another dialogue window, where you can specify the directory where the NetCDF files are. Navigate to that directory!
Note that you will not see anything in this directory, because the display filter is set to directories/folders. When you know that you are in that directory where the .nc files are, click on Select Folder!
This will jump back to the previous - now populated - window:
Note that there is a table in the middle, with three columns, with information filled in automatically: - Time (Ma): Based on the file name, what is the age of the map - File: The actual file name - Bands: Which raster band will be loaded (for these files this will be the only option)
You can make sure that every file will be processed correctly by scrolling through the entire list. You can manually edit any age or band entry, if necessary. Note that you have one file for every 5 million years. If not, click on Next!