GPlates is desktop software for the interactive visualisation of plate tectonics.

GPlates offers a novel combination of interactive plate tectonic reconstructions, geographic information system (GIS) functionality and raster data visualisation. GPlates enables both the visualisation and the manipulation of plate tectonic reconstructions and associated data through geological time. GPlates runs on Windows, Linux and macOS. GPlates has an online user manual.

GPlates and pyGPlates are both free software (also known as open-source software), licensed for distribution under the GNU General Public License (GPL), version 2.

GPlately is a Python package which enables the reconstruction of data through deep geological time (points, lines, polygons, and rasters), the interrogation of plate kinematic information (plate velocities, rates of subduction and seafloor spreading), the rapid comparison between multiple plate motion models, and the plotting of reconstructed output data on maps.

GPlates is developed by an international team of scientists and professional software developers at: the EarthByte group in the school of Geosciences at the University of Sydney with past contributions from: the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences (GPS) at Caltech the Centre for Earth Evolution and Dynamics (CEED) at the Department of Geosciences, University of Oslo, Norway the Geodynamics Team at the Geological Survey of Norway (NGU).

I guess there has been a Google maps update. I relied on this for public transport trip planning. I'm baffled as to how to do this anymore. Anyone got any ideas?

I could not find any mentions of these problems online. The article itself has no technical detail.

Looking forward to seeing what the actual problems are. It seems this is the first product to market.

Guesses based off the general subject matter:

• Silica concentrations probably vary depending on the exact position of your head, especially since it's heavy material. If you mount this sensor even a few meters away from a worker then it's readings could possibly become invalid, eg because an angle grinder is firing dust a different direction to the sensor.
• Silica is a slang term for a very big category of materials. Some might look completely different to others under certain laser observations, leading to some getting missed (bad) and others materials triggering false positives (leading to the sensor's screams being ignored by workers).
• Self-cleaning routines might be needed to stop it clogging up, otherwise the sensor starts reporting a higher baseline. They could either choose to report this ("pls clean me" light comes on) or ignore it (bury head in sand mode).
• Alternatively it's performance might actually be fine, but perhaps it's still being spruked inappropriately. Government involvement in funding the project might (?) magnify this problem.

Ah yes, cause monopolies have never been bad for the customer (looks at supermarkets).