Abstract As spherical shell mantle convection models become increasingly commonplace, understanding how plates are generated has raised the issue of how to recognize whether rigid plates are present in model output. Tectonocists have long recognized that intraplate regions are not rigid without exception. Specifically, lithospheric deformation, widely evident on the continents, also occurs within oceanic regions and additionally results in tectonic plate boundaries having varying widths. These, non‐rigid, diffuse regions comprise roughly 15% of the terrestrial surface and identification of their analogs in models is an important step in recognizing progress on the goal of modeling plate generation. We describe a new plate detection tool, platerecipy , that utilizes the Random Walker segmentation algorithm to identify candidate plates in both mantle convection model output and global geophysical data sets. The method produces a set of probabilities for each surface data point that can be used to both assess confidence in the association of each location with a distinct rigid plate, and identify diffuse regions across the surface. Verification of the rigidity of each region identified as a distinct plate can be obtained by inverting the associated data for the candidate plate's Euler vector. We demonstrate the method's sensitivity to the three controlling parameters used by platerecipy 's algorithm and how the method can be used to determine the Euler vectors of plates identified in a mantle convection model. We also present promising results found by inverting for the Euler vectors of the Earth's major plates through applying platerecipy to a global strain‐rate field.
Javaheri et al. (Sun,) studied this question.