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20050819: IDV - million years before present

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  • Subject: 20050819: IDV - million years before present
  • Date: Fri, 19 Aug 2005 15:50:13 -0600
>From: "Stuart Wier" <address@hidden>
>Organization: UNAVCO
>Keywords: 200508192127.j7JLRL4Y004563 IDV years

Hi Stuart-

>Institution: UNAVCO
>Package Version: -
>Operating System: linux
>Hardware Information: the usual
>Inquiry: Working with mantle convection flow in the IDV, I am seeing data with
>  times in million years before present. (mybp)
>How do you represent that in ud units? This is a standard in geology and geoph
> ysics, or if it does not meet the dictionary definition of standard, let's ju
> st say everyone in solid earth sciences knows what it means. I suppose second
> s since 1/1/1970 is not a good idea.

It depends how you want to specify the present.  It will be different
tomorrow than today. ;-)

The best way would be to specify a base time for "present".  Then,
you could use:

-1 Ma since 2005-01-01

which would give you one million years before the first of January.
(there's a bug which would cause an error if you specify -1.0, so
for now use -1).

The labels in the IDV will probably not handle this gracefully, but
the it should handle the conversions.  

Don Murray
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