PaleoMag for Macintosh: Overview


PaleoMag 3.1

OS X version, Windows, Linux, and PPC versions now available on the PaleoMag 3.1 page.

The newest version of this software now contains core functions for many paleomagnetics applications, including sample list, orthographic, J/J0, and equal area plots with least-squares fits to lines, planes, and circles; least-squares lists and stratigraphic and equal-area plots, with Fisher Line, Line+Plane, Line+Arc, and Hemisphere versions of these statistics, Bingham line, plane, line+plane statistics. Sample and locality edits are also possible. Downloads and version history info are on the PaleoMag 3.1 page.


PaleoMag 2.3.1 (Archival version)

***--- Bug Warning --- ***

A possibly significant bug exists in versions of PaleoMag predating v2.3b6. Combining line and plane data using Fisher statistics can produce trouble. Please use v2.3b6 or later to avoid this problem. Details can be found elsewhere.

PaleoMag is an attempt to provide an integrated, graphics-oriented analysis environment for paleomagnetic data. It reads data preferably in CIT format but optionally in tab-delimited format and can display the data in orthographic (Zijderveld) plots, equal-area plots, or J/J0 plots. Users can flexibly choose data points to be fit using the line, plane, or great-circle fits described by Kirschvink (1980). Resulting fits can be displayed using equal-area or strigraphic plots and mean directions and uncertainties can be calculated using Fisher, Bingham, or non-parametric statistics. These statistics can be based either on sample fits or site averages. Several options for combining line and plane fits are allowed, and a simple reversal test is supported. Plots can be printed or copied to the clipboard but cannot be saved to disk directly.

The old version of PaleoMag (2.3.1) will not run on most modern Macintosh computers. You might wish to see if one of the emulators of old 68k Macs might help you out (PaleoMag is not the only ancient software out there!):

An associated utility is Redirect, which allows the user to see the effect different sample and bedding orientations have on paleomagnetic directions. It is primarily intended to allow a user to locate a blunder in data entry and see how the blunder might be corrected without changing the data files (as PaleoMag would do).

Steve Salyards has written a PC code to convert from Gillett format paleomagnetic data to CIT format. You used to be able to get it from his web page; the software was removed from the UCLA ftp server as far as I can tell. If somebody out there sends me a copy of this software, I'll put it on our ftp server.



Please send mail to cjones@terra.colorado.edu if you encounter any problems or have suggestions.

C. H. Jones | CIRES | Dept. of Geological Sciences | Univ. of Colorado at Boulder

Last modified at Monday, September 12, 2005 9:01 AM