The age of the ocean floor and its time-dependent age distribution control fundamental features of the Earth, such as bathymetry, sea level and mantle heat loss. Recently, the development of increasingly sophisticated reconstructions of past plate motions has provided models for plate kinematics and plate boundary evolution back in geological time. These models implicitly include the information necessary to determine the age of ocean floor that has since been lost to subduction. However, due to the lack of an automated and efficient method for generating global seafloor age grids, many tectonic models, most notably those extending back into the Paleozoic, are published without an accompanying set of age models for oceanic lithosphere. Here we present an automatic, tracer-based algorithm that generates seafloor age grids from global plate tectonic reconstructions with defined plate boundaries. Our method enables us to produce the first seafloor age models for the Paleozoic's lost ocean basins. Estimated changes in sea level based on bathymetry inferred from our new age grids show good agreement with sea level record estimations from proxies, providing a possible explanation for the peak in sea level during the assembly phase of Pangea. This demonstrates how our seafloor age models can be directly compared with observables from the geologic record that extend further back in time than the constraints from preserved seafloor. Thus, our new algorithm may also aid the further development of plate tectonic reconstructions by strengthening the links between geological observations and tectonic reconstructions of deeper time.

中文翻译：

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一种基于板块构造重建自动生成海底年龄网格的示踪算法

海底的年龄及其随时间变化的年龄分布控制着地球的基本特征，如水深测量、海平面和地幔热损失。最近，对过去板块运动的日益复杂的重建发展为地质年代的板块运动学和板块边界演化提供了模型。这些模型隐含地包括确定因俯冲而消失的洋底年龄所需的信息。然而，由于缺乏生成全球海底年龄网格的自动化和有效方法，许多构造模型，尤其是那些延伸回古生代的构造模型，在发布时没有附带一套海洋岩石圈年龄模型。在这里，我们提出一个自动，基于示踪剂的算法，从具有定义板块边界的全球板块构造重建中生成海底年龄网格。我们的方法使我们能够为古生代消失的海洋盆地制作第一个海底年龄模型。基于从我们的新时代网格推断出的水深测量，估计的海平面变化与来自代理的海平面记录估计非常吻合，为盘古大陆组装阶段海平面的峰值提供了可能的解释。这证明了我们的海底年龄模型如何可以直接与地质记录中的观测值进行比较，这些观测值在时间上比保存的海底的限制更远。因此，