Paleogeographic reconstruction of an area of the earth crust

A system for paleogeographic reconstruction of a selected Area Of Interest (AOI) of the earth crust, the system comprising a non-transitory computer readable medium storing instructions, which, when executed by one or more computing device processors of the system, causes the system to:

• a) load a tectonic plate model, which divides the earth crust into a series of adjacent plate sections and their motion history through time;
• b) load a paleogeographic reconstruction engine equipped with a Paleo Event Table (PET) creator tool box;
• and
• c) a Graphical User Interface (GUI) that is induced and/or allows a user to create a PET that displays a sampled paleogeographic dataset;
• and execute instructions wherein inducing and/or allowing the user to spatially join a selected AOI to one selected tectonic plate in the tectonic plate model, which selected tectonic plate has an overlap with the AOI, and with a sampled paleogeographic dataset with information for a series of paleogeographic time steps to create a Paleo Event Table (PET) that displays sampled paleogeographic data,
• wherein the PET creator tool box comprises computer executable instructions for:
• i) generating a paleogeographic reconstruction of plate sections in a region that includes an effective AOI, by running the tectonic plate model for the effective AOI to selected times throughout a geological timeframe of interest identified by the user, which effective AOI comprises at least the selected AOI;
• ii) generating an event table which based on the reconstruction of step i) identifies which parts of neighboring plate(s) and/or basin sections intersect with the effective AOI at the selected times;
• iii) highlighting overlap areas of the identified intersecting neighboring plates by cookie cutting sub-crop areas of the neighboring plates that intersect with the effective AOI;
• iv) providing each highlighted overlap area with a time tag and a plate code of an original plate which overlapped with the effective AOI;
• v) unreconstructing the highlighted overlap areas from different paleogeographic time steps to identify recent areas of the neighboring plates that were overlapping with the effective AOI in the past;
• vi) sampling the paleogeographic dataset, including point, line, polygon and raster data, with information tagged with recent geographic locations for different paleogeographic time intervals based on elements i)-v);
• and
• vii) displaying the sampled paleographic dataset and/or datasets obtained by other available paleogeographic reconstruction software packages in an output PET in the GUI.