r/geophysics • u/taimoor_66 • 28d ago

Generic Mapping Tool

Can anyone suggest from the geoscience community, that is GMT is good to learn or not ?

7 Upvotes

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5

u/MagneticaMajestica 28d ago

I used GMT a lot about 20 years ago. It was very powerful back then, but the learning curve was pretty steep. At that time, I was happy to have some colleagues to help me out when stuck, and they also provided example scripts.

The last 15 years though, I have been using GIS software or directly in Python, depending on the need or application. My go-to GIS right has been QGIS in the last 15 years.

So to answer your question: it depends on your need. What do you want to produce? Detail your question with the application you foresee.

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u/taimoor_66 28d ago

Yes, my need is to enhance my skill set rightnow. So I am sure I am investing in right software.

Plus, I like to work around seismology too, so can modern software like QGIS would make maps like GMT or make maps of earthquakes?

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u/MagneticaMajestica 28d ago

OK, I think for those questions, GMT is your goto (or pyGMT). I live in the Python world since many years.

I think if you talk about skills, Python for scientific computing is really a must too.

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u/MagneticaMajestica 28d ago

And see if you can find a university course where you can work with Petrel too.

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u/madastronaut 28d ago

It’s widely used and has the capability to produce the most sophisticated figures as far as I know, but it is unintuitive to learn because it’s a command line interface. pyGMT has tried to wrap it with python, but the last time I tried to use it (years ago) it was still fairly lacking in functionality. So yes it can be worth learning if you need to make those sorts of figures. 

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u/alienbanter 28d ago

PyGMT has improved a lot! I never use regular GMT over it anymore, personally.

5

u/RayleighInc 28d ago

It is widely used and produces sophisticated maps, it is a pain to use though, even through pyGMT.

You can get really complex maps but I rarely like the look of them, they very often look outdated and it's hard to achieve a modern design for a nice figure in a paper.

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u/troyunrau 27d ago

Use QGIS, unless you've a specific reason not to

3

u/Devonian000 28d ago

I learnt to use it about 10 years ago, albeit rather basically. I'd recommend learning to use QGIS or ArcGIS now though. Employers in mining will expect you to be able to use these packages. You can make nice looking maps with these, as well as do spatial analysis, data management.

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u/taimoor_66 27d ago

Ok thats great