2025/08/05 by William Gearty · 2 voices · 4 citations
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Environmental Science · Computer Science · #Geological Modeling and Analysis #Soil Geostatistics and Mapping #Computational Physics and Python Applications
paper · doi:10.1080/20964471.2025.2537516
Data visualization is a key component of any scientific data analysis workflow and is vital for the summarization and dissemination of complex ideas and results. One common hurdle across the Earth Sciences and other scientific fields remains the reproducibility of many types of visualizations of data over long time intervals (>10,000 years). This paper introduces the R package deeptime, which provides easy-to-use functions to facilitate a wide array of fully reproducible visualizations of geological data. The package facilitates streamlined access to geological reference data, such as geological timescales and lithostratigraphic patterns, and includes novel functionality to incorporate these data into a wide range of existing visualizations. By leveraging the existing framework of the ggplot2 R package, deeptime allows for these visualizations to be highly customizable. The open-source and constantly evolving package is accompanied by exhaustive documentation about the myriad options available to users and several tutorials demonstrating the available functionality. It is anticipated that deeptime will reduce the amount of time and experience needed to make reproducible and professional data visualizations, giving scientists more time to ensure that these visualizations are more accessible and engaging.