GPlates is open-source application software offering a novel combination of interactive plate-tectonic reconstructions, geographic information system (GIS) functionality and raster data visualisation.

By incorporating this technology stack, GPlates simplifies and streamlines data processing, integration, analysis, and visualisation to ease the workload for geoscientists.

GPlates enables both the visualization and the manipulation of plate-tectonic reconstructions and associated data through geological time: GPlates is developed by an international team of scientists and professional software developers at: with past contributions from: GPlates is used by geophysicists, students and researchers in academic institutions, government departments and industry.

It has also gained currency in the creative worldbuilding community as a tool for maintaining realism or verisimilitude in geographic features.

In 2019, two Australian researchers used the software to create a tectonic map of the continents within the fictional Game of Thrones universe.

[1] GPlates runs on Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows and Linux.

GPlates is written in C++ and uses OpenGL to render its 3D globe and 2D map views.

GPlates is released under GNU General Public License version 2.0 (GPLv2) and the source code can be found on SourceForge.

Users can deploy the Docker container locally to enhance performance and data security.

The GPlately Python library is a high-level encapsulation of pygplates and PlateTectonicTools.