Home
Topsoil is a desktop application and Java library that creates data visualizations for geochronologists and other earth scientists. The project is led and maintained by CIRDLES, an undergraduate research lab at the College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina.
"Topsoil" is an anagram of "Isoplot", the name of an enormously successful Microsoft Excel Add-In with similar capabilities that now works only in older versions of Excel.
If you are interested in learning more about Topsoil, please contact Jim Bowring.
To cite Topsoil, please provide a footnote or acknowledgment as follows:
J.F. Bowring, PI CIRDLES.org Open Source Development Team. Topsoil - A community-driven replacement for ISOPLOT. Apache License, Version 2.0. https://github.com/CIRDLES/topsoil.
We have an article in production that will become the official citable reference, stay tuned.
Topsoil will run on Windows (x86 and x64), Linux (x86 and x64), and Mac (x64 only). Topsoil requires the latest version of Java (8u131 or higher), the installer for which can be found here.
To install Topsoil, first, ensure that your computer meets our system requirements and then download the latest JAR file from the releases page.
To run Topsoil, simply double click on the JAR file.
Once you have the source code, navigate to the root directory in a terminal and execute the command ./gradlew build. This will build the required resources. After that, you can create a JAR file by running ./gradlew jarWithDependencies. The resulting JAR file will be in Topsoil/app/build/libs with the name topsoil-[version].jar.
Below are two sets of sample data which may be copied and imported into Topsoil via Data Table > Import Data Table > Import From Clipboard. For a more detailed explanation of importing data into Topsoil, as well as a simple tutorial on Topsoil's usage, see the Topsoil project page of the CIRDLES website. The general format of a data table file would be a column for the data, uncertainty (if exists), and corr coef (if an x and y or more exist).
Uranium-Lead:
| 207Pb*/235U | ±2σ(%) | 206Pb*/238U | ±2σ (%) | corr coef |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 29.165688743 | 1.519417676 | 0.712165893 | 1.395116767 | 0.918191745 |
| 29.031535970 | 1.799945600 | 0.714916493 | 1.647075269 | 0.915069472 |
| 29.002008069 | 1.441943510 | 0.709482828 | 1.324922704 | 0.918845083 |
| 29.203969765 | 1.320690194 | 0.707078490 | 1.216231698 | 0.920906132 |
| 29.194452092 | 1.359029744 | 0.709615006 | 1.248057588 | 0.918344571 |
| 29.293320455 | 1.424328137 | 0.710934267 | 1.309135282 | 0.919124777 |
| 28.497489852 | 1.353243890 | 0.686951820 | 1.245648095 | 0.920490463 |
| 29.218573677 | 1.383868032 | 0.715702180 | 1.271276031 | 0.918639641 |
| 28.884872020 | 1.264304654 | 0.702153693 | 1.164978444 | 0.921438073 |
| 28.863259209 | 1.455550200 | 0.700081472 | 1.335582301 | 0.917579003 |
| 29.014325453 | 1.614480021 | 0.701464404 | 1.478394505 | 0.915709384 |
| 29.917885787 | 1.564622589 | 0.725185047 | 1.434906094 | 0.917094067 |
| 30.159907714 | 1.488528691 | 0.724886106 | 1.366282212 | 0.917874287 |
| 28.963153308 | 1.480754780 | 0.698240706 | 1.359750830 | 0.918282249 |
| 29.350104553 | 1.513999270 | 0.711983592 | 1.384417989 | 0.914411266 |
| 29.979576581 | 1.595745814 | 0.724426340 | 1.458894294 | 0.914239775 |
| 29.344673618 | 1.551935035 | 0.714166474 | 1.420060290 | 0.915025602 |
Uranium-Thorium (explicit rho values):
| 230Th*/238U | ±2σ (abs) | 234U*/238U | ±2σ (abs) | corr coef |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0.787174467 | 0.002472973 | 1.112997105 | 0.004812142 | 0.0 |
| 0.785279872 | 0.003488836 | 1.104535717 | 0.003504504 | 0.0 |
| 0.757751874 | 0.003437122 | 1.098862611 | 0.004937997 | 0.0 |
| 0.756755971 | 0.002292904 | 1.095577076 | 0.00361392 | 0.0 |
| 0.769622435 | 0.003069412 | 1.10493373 | 0.005966043 | 0.0 |
| 0.754230241 | 0.004366264 | 1.099870658 | 0.003039218 | 0.0 |
| 0.760346901 | 0.004460567 | 1.104336707 | 0.004830971 | 0.0 |
| 0.759050757 | 0.002174949 | 1.098264378 | 0.005414218 | 0.0 |
| 0.766429941 | 0.007290816 | 1.102943341 | 0.003127906 | 0.0 |
| 0.777301225 | 0.003167341 | 1.101947646 | 0.003224137 | 0.0 |
| 0.779894193 | 0.003500865 | 1.118173335 | 0.00696614 | 0.0 |
| 0.781888816 | 0.003270823 | 1.118372424 | 0.008000935 | 0.0 |
| 0.782985109 | 0.00383209 | 1.117974657 | 0.004330706 | 0.0 |
| 0.781688601 | 0.004060869 | 1.111205641 | 0.007176835 | 0.0 |
| 0.762741024 | 0.002969033 | 1.10792003 | 0.00482314 | 0.0 |
| 0.763237957 | 0.004908767 | 1.103739947 | 0.004548051 | 0.0 |
| 0.769023512 | 0.003525521 | 1.110209805 | 0.005196072 | 0.0 |
| 0.769917231 | 0.002727962 | 1.105831646 | 0.005963751 | 0.0 |
| 0.776501596 | 0.003282191 | 1.112997925 | 0.004246044 | 0.0 |
| 0.776998549 | 0.003054914 | 1.111107425 | 0.003777516 | 0.0 |
| 0.798544256 | 0.001562462 | 1.117575886 | 0.005461398 | 0.0 |
| 0.800139952 | 0.002006875 | 1.114788659 | 0.005468221 | 0.0 |
| 0.800439225 | 0.003009748 | 1.113992263 | 0.003583907 | 0.0 |
| 0.803930031 | 0.002447054 | 1.11817297 | 0.00376547 | 0.0 |
| 0.763039792 | 0.003881829 | 1.107123872 | 0.007757655 | 0.0 |