Subduction of water in oceanic plate reservoirs

A repository to calculate subducted H2O, stored H2O and slab outflux of H2O through time.

Reference: Mather, B.R., Müller, R.D., Dutkiewicz, A. et al. Carbon emissions along divergent plate boundaries modulate icehouse-greenhouse climates. Commun Earth Environ 7, 48 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-025-03097-0

Dependencies

The following Python libraries are required to run this workflow:

1. gplately and its dependencies
2. slabdip
3. moviepy
4. joblib

Required input files

The required input files for this workflow are:

1. All files in \utils\
2. All files in \loss_of_subducting_H2O_with_depth
3. Input grids, which should follow the structure:

water_subduction/
│
├── 01-Sources-of-Water.ipynb
├── 02-Subducted-Water.ipynb
├── 03-Water-Storage.ipynb
├── 04-Water-Slab-Outflux.ipynb
├── 05-Cumulative-Water-Grids.ipynb
│
├── utils/
│   └── ...
│
├── loss_of_subducting_H2O_with_depth/
│   └── ...
│
└── Grids/
    │
    └── InputGrids/
        ├── CarbonateSediment/
        ├── ContinentalMasks/
        ├── CrustalCarbon/
        ├── SeafloorAge/
        ├── SpreadingRate/
        └── TotalSediment/

Input grids

The input grids should be prepared as follows, depending on the plate reconstruction model required, see EarthByte Group's list of available global and regional plate motion models:

• CarbonateSediment from the GitHub workflow CarbonateSedimentThickness
• ContinentalMasks, SeafloorAge and SpreadingRate may be found in the EarthByte Group's list of available global and regional plate motion models, subject to availability. Otherwise, the grids can be produced from gplately's SeafloorGrid module - see the sample notebook here. Otherwise, grids may also be available for the selected plate model elsewhere, like Zenodo or webDAV.
• CrustalCarbon from \utils\, which itself requires the SeafloorAge and SpreadingRate grids.
• TotalSediment from the GitHub workflow. More details here.

Workflow

1. 01-Sources-of-Water.ipynb - Produces total water grids for each reservoir.
2. 02-Subducted-Water.ipynb - Interpolate the grids in (1) at subduction zones to generate subducted water grids.
3. 03-Water-Storage.ipynb - Develop water storage grids from lookup tables.
4. 04-Water-Slab-Outflux.ipynb - Develop slab outflux as the difference between subducted water (2) and water storage (3).
5. 05-Cumulative-Water-Grids.ipynb - Develop cumulative subducted water, water storage and water slab outflux grids.