Tectonic plates and geological provinces
There may be a few icy bodies that also experience some form of tectonics, but Earth is unique in the solar system as a terrestrial body that experiences tectonics. The boundaries of tectonic plates represent the edges where plates diverge, converge, or slide past each other. Some of these boundaries are discrete whereas others are quite wide forming plate boundary zones. These plate boundary zones come in two flavors: microplates and deformation zones. Microplates act like miniature plates with deformation constrained to very narrow regions. In deformation zones, the deformation is more continuous throughout the region.
The plate models shown here are the culmination of a nearly three year project to improve upon previous plate models and also develop a global model for geological provinces. The geological provinces include a raft of attributes that can be used to add valuable metadata to other data that fall within the provinces. Attributes include the tectonic setting and last orogeny.
The purpose of these models is to create a seamless set of digital polygons and establish a data standard that can be used to enrich geoscientific data. The model is currently in review, but it can be downloaded from GitHub (https://github.com/dhasterok/global_tectonics/). The models are available in formats suitable for use in GIS programs, GoogleEarth, and Generic Mapping Tools (GMT).
A preprint is available from EarthArXiv (https://doi.org/10.31223/X5TD1C).