Jyotirmoy Paul, Researcher Indian Institute of Science, Contact via Twitter Disclaimer: Unfortunately, this article will be useful only for those who are privileged to get a computer and good internet connection. The pandemic has made our life stagnant. Students are suffering the most because their colleges and universities are completely shut down. The online classes are not that effective. Many students have asked us about possible opportunities for internships. Unfortunately, in this COVID time, when PhD students have restricted access to the labs, supervisors hardly accept any intern students in their labs. Most students do not know how to utilise this free time and learn something new by themselves. I will talk about some self-resourced free software/tools that can be accessed from home if you have a computer. Though these software/packages are more familiar to geophysics researchers; however, students interested in any Earth Science discipline can learn and utilize them as per their needs. GPlates: GPlates is an open-source (free to everyone) GUI-based (click and drag) software to study plate-tectonic reconstruction. Geologists are always curious about the past locations of present-day geological features, be it continent, ocean, or fault. Using different reconstruction models, GPlates can reconstruct any surface location for several million years. You can also visualise the velocity of plates at any time in the past using GPlates. GPlates have many other features and a huge data repository at EarthByte (https://www.earthbyte.org) that are easily downloadable for free. GPlates is a very easy-to-learn package as there is a detailed guideline for different levels of students: https://www.gplates.org/education. A Geology graduate may look for slightly more detailed tutorials. UNIX OS: Are you interested in coding? Then, there can be nothing better than having a UNIX OS. Most of us are familiar with using Windows. There are certain limitations for Windows OS if you are interested in coding. It is not that you can’t do coding in windows OS, but UNIX will be more user-friendly and resourceful. But if you have a laptop/ desktop with Windows OS, do you need another one to install UNIX? NO! You can get a dual boot in your laptop where both windows and UNIX can be installed. The most popular version of UNIX OS is the Ubuntu interface. You can get plenty of videos on YouTube to understand the process of dual booting or partitioning laptop memory. UNIX is absolutely free, unlike Windows OS! And most software will also be free in this OS. You might have scratched your head to find a cracked version of MATLAB. In UNIX, you get a free clone of MATLAB, called OCTAVE (https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/index)! Not only MATLAB, but all major programming language compilers, like gcc (for C), gfortran (for FORTRAN), and interpreters like Python, will also automatically be installed. Once you have installed UNIX, get familiar with the terminal. You can access the whole system (any folder, pdf, music, video) from a single point without clicking into different folders. When you get familiar with basic commands like ls, cd, rm, cat, head, tail, grep, and so on, you can now start learning shell scripts, one of the most powerful tools for data processing. Using a one-liner “awk”/ “gawk” (https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/awk-command-unixlinux-examples/) you can do almost all mathematical operations in shell script without learning sophisticated programming languages like C or Fortran. Generic mapping tool (GMT): Geophysicists must learn to create colorful maps to visualise data in global or regional scale. For example, here is a map for lithosphere thickness. By looking at the colorful map, you can understand where the lithosphere is thick and thin. Geochemists, structural geologists, paleontologists, and petrologists can use it as per their requirements. Many of the features are available on ArcGIS. However, GMT (https://www.generic-mapping-tools.org) being free software has more advantages. GMT is also well documented and can be self-taught. From the GMT 5 version, the installation process has become extremely easy, unlike the older versions where you need support from zlib, hdf5, and netcdf. Just writing one line in the Ubuntu terminal will install GMT 5. Learn basic commands from the GMT tutorials (https://docs.generic-mapping-tools.org/5.4/). Shell script and GMT can be combined together to ease the coding difficulties. If you are lost in the huge repository of GMT website and do not understand from where to start, may have a look here: https://jyotirmoyp.github.io/resource/gmt/ MATPLOTLIB: It is high time that you stop using MS-Excel to plot data. There are some dedicated software packages for plotting, (e.g., Origin Lab) but most of them are not freely available. Beautiful plots can be prepared in MATLAB, but MATLAB also does not come for free. MATPLOTLIB, a library of Python, is now widely used for scientific plotting and that is freely available for everyone. Every details about this package and user guideline can be found here: https://matplotlib.org. Others: Other tools are very popular in the geoscience discipline. R (https://www.r-project.org) is such a tool that can efficiently code statistical analysis. There are many more tools that you can learn. If you are advanced enough, you may have a look at the Computational Infrastructure for Geodynamics website (https://geodynamics.org) for an overview of different community codes available for understanding large-scale geophysical processes. Feel free to contact author if you have any queries regarding these tools.
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