Okay, this section is going to be a quick one. First off, open your model and set the time back to 150 Mya. Go under the Digitise tools, and choose ”Digitise new multi-point geometry”. Then simply place a point where you wish a hotspot to be located 150 Mya, Create feature and choose MotionPath.

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Then choose a name for the hotspot and specify time of appearance (150 Mya in this case). Set the Plate ID as that of the plate that will be travelling over the hotspot, and leave Relative Plate ID at 0 (the planet’s spin axis).

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Next, insert an array of time instants from 150 to 0 Mya at 10 Mya intervals, just as you did with the flowline.

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Click next and save the motion path in a new feature collection called “Hotspot Trails”. Normally, the motion path will be coloured according to the Plate ID we gave it. I recommend changing the colour, in order to make it more visible (changing the colours of feature collections was covered in Section 2c). Now, go ahead and play the animation. For me, this was the result:

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As you’ll note, the trail is quite different from the flowlines. This is because motion paths represent the absolute motion of a plate relative to a fixed point on the globe, whereas the flowlines depict the relative motion between two plates. Also, with motion paths it’s good to remember that the arrows point away from the present-day position of the point. As you can see, this feature is extremely useful for tracing hotspot trails!

That’s it for this section! You’ve now covered the essentials, and already have the tools to make pretty good use of GPlates. However, in case you want to go the extra mile, and not only want your continents to move, but also want them to move at plausible speed, next I’ll cover how you can check the velocities of your continents.