deeptime: an R package that facilitates highly customizable visualizations of data over geological time intervals

William Gearty 

Data visualization is a key component of any scientific data analysis workflow and is vital for the summarization and dissemination of complex ideas and results. One common hurdle across the Earth Sciences and other scientific fields remains the effective and reproducible visualization of data over long time intervals (104 – 107 years). Here I introduce the R package deeptime, which provides easy-to-use functions to facilitate visualizations of geological data. The package includes functionality to add various geological timescales to many different types of plots, use standardized stratigraphical patterns within figures, visualize continuous and discrete temporal data, and more. By leveraging the existing frameworks of the ggplot2 R package and the wider tidyverse R package ecosystem, deeptime allows for these visualizations to be highly customizable. Further miscellaneous functionality includes custom scales and coordinate systems to be used with ggplot2 and tools to use standardized stratigraphic patterns within figures. The open-source and constantly evolving package is accompanied by exhaustive documentation about the myriad options available to users and several tutorials demonstrating the available functionality. My hope is that deeptime will reduce the amount of time and experience needed to make reproducible and professional data visualizations, giving scientists more time to ensure that these visualizations are more accessible and engaging.