T_c1D - A 1D thermal and thermochronometer age prediction model

T_c1D is a one-dimensional thermal and thermochronometer age prediction model that can simulate the effects of various geodynamic and geomorphic processes on thermochronometer ages. It supports forward and inverse modeling of apatite and zircon (U-Th)/He and fission-track ages.

Below you will find some essential details about using the code and more detailed documentation can be found on the T_c1D documentation site.

Getting started

The easiest way to get started using T_c1D is via the launch binder button above. This will open an interactive demo of T_c1D using Binder. Instructions for how to install T_c1D are below.

Installation

For most users, you can install T_c1D in your Python environment using pip by simply typing

pip install tc1d

Thermochronometer ages are calculated using T_cages, which is installed automatically with T_c1D.

Note

If you are interested in running inversions in parallel using MPI, see the online documentation for details.

Warning

If you choose to install T_c1D versions older than 0.5.0, you will also need to install the thermochronometer age prediction programs available in the v0.2 release of T_ccore in order for T_c1D to work properly. Installing the latest version of T_c1D is strongly recommended.

Usage

An example model with 10 km of exhumation and default values can be run from the command line as follows:

tc1d-cli --ero-option1 10.0

A full list of options that can be used with T_c1D can be found by running the code with the --help flag (or no specified flags):

tc1d-cli --help

This will return a usage statement and list of flags the code accepts.

Example notebooks

Additional examples of how to run T_c1D can be found in a set of Jupyter notebooks, which you can try online using the launch binder button above. To get a local copy of all of the notebooks and their data files, run

tc1d-notebooks

This downloads the notebooks matching your installed version of T_c1D into a new tc1d-notebooks directory. Use tc1d-notebooks --help to see how to choose a different location or version. The notebooks are also available as a ZIP file attached to each T_c1D release, and the notebooks for the latest release can be downloaded directly from this link.

To run the notebooks locally you will also need JupyterLab, which can be installed along with T_c1D using

pip install "tc1d[notebook]"

Citation

How to cite the code

Use of T_c1D can be acknowledged by citing the relevant version of T_c1D using the DOI from Zenodo that always points to the latest version (10.5281/zenodo.7124271). For example, the citation for version 0.7.0 is

Whipp, D. M., Gérard, B., Laaksonen, S., & Dönges, S. (2026). Tc1D - A 1D thermal and thermochronometer age prediction model (Version 0.7.0) [Computer software]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23721479

How to cite the paper

You're also welcome to cite the related T_c1D technical note when referencing ideas from the article.

Whipp, D. M., Gérard, B., Laaksonen, S., and Kellett, D. A. (2026). Technical note: Tc1D – a 1D thermal and thermochronometer age prediction model. Geochronology, 8, 627–643. https://doi.org/10.5194/gchron-8-627-2026

Additional references

The following articles may also be useful to cite when sharing results from T_c1D:

Flowers, R. M., Ketcham, R. A., Shuster, D. L., & Farley, K. A. (2009). Apatite (U-Th)/He thermochronometry using a radiation damage accumulation and annealing model. Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, 73(8), 2347--2365.

Guenthner, W. R., Reiners, P. W., Ketcham, R. A., Nasdala, L., & Giester, G. (2013). Helium diffusion in natural zircon: Radiation damage, anisotropy, and the interpretation of zircon (U-Th)/He thermochronology. American Journal of Science, 313(3), 145–198. https://doi.org/10.2475/03.2013.01

Ketcham, R. A., Donelick, R. A., & Carlson, W. D.: Variability of apatite fission-track annealing kinetics III: Extrapolation to geological time scales. American Mineralogist, 84, 1235-1255, doi: 10.2138/am-1999-0903, 1999.

Ketcham, R. A., Carter, A., Donelick, R. A., Barbarand, J., & Hurford, A. J. (2007). Improved modeling of fission-track annealing in apatite. American Mineralogist, 92(5–6), 799--810.

Ketcham, R. A., Mora, A., and Parra, M.: Deciphering exhumation and burial history with multi-sample down-well thermochronometric inverse modelling, Basin Res., 30, 48-64, 10.1111/bre.12207, 2018.

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge Saska Dönges from the University of Helsinki Research Software Engineering (UH-RSE) for scientific computing support.

License

The T_c1D is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3: T_c1D software license