If I want to create a map of Pangea with GMT, similar to this, how can I do it?
As far as I know, gmt doesn’t have any included paleocoastlines for mapping. Your best bet is to plot a geo-referenced raster of Pangea. You could find some rasters here. Alternatively, if you want to create a figure like the one you linked, you could use software like GPlates to cookie-cut an existing raster of a global political map, reconstruct it to ~250 Ma, then export it as a raster.
GPlates can export reconstructions as vector, and you can plot that. See e.g. Animation: Paleogeographic reconstruction.
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Alternatively - if you don’t want to install/run/learn GPlates, you can also use the webservice to generate geojson output which you can then translate with ogr2ogr and plot in GMT - something like this should work on both Win/*nix for plotting static polygons (ie the extent of continental crust, can do the same for coastlines) - not extensively tested but gives you an idea:
wget "https://gws.gplates.org/reconstruct/static_polygons/?time=100" -O- | \
ogr2ogr -F "OGR_GMT" staticpolygons_100Ma.gmt /vsistdin/
gmt plot staticpolygons_100Ma.gmt....
with the last line using @Andreas’ example to plot.
There are a number of models/features you can chose from - static polygons, coastlines and models which go back 250, 4xx or 1000 Ma.
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Thanks for sharing this!
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Me thanks too. Have to explore this more but I quickly can do
julia> D = gdalread("https://gws.gplates.org/reconstruct/static_polygons/?time=100");
julia> viz(D)
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Now that is seriously short. Not bad!