EarthByte is an internationally leading eGeoscience collaboration between several Australian Universities, international centres of excellence and industry partners. One of the fundamental aims of the EarthByte Group is geodata synthesis through space and time, assimilating the wealth of disparate geological and geophysical data into a four-dimensional Earth model including tectonics, geodynamics and surface processes. The EarthByte Group is pursuing open innovation via collaborative software development, high performance and distributed computing, “big data” analysis and by making open access digital data collections available to the community.
The group is leading the ARC Basin Genesis Industry Transformation Hub, a research centre funded jointly by the Australian Research Council and several industry partners. The Hub’s aim is the fusing of multidimensional data into 5D basin models (space and time, with uncertainty estimates) by coupling the evolution of mantle flow, crustal deformation, erosion and sedimentary processes from global to basin scales. The EarthByters lead the collaborative development of open-source virtual Earth software, including Badlands,Underworld, GPlates and the GPlates web portal. Badlands enables surface process modelling linked to lithospheric deformation and mantle convection models, while Underworld is a geodynamics code which provides a programmable and flexible front end, running in a parallel HPC environment. GPlates enables the interactive manipulation and visualisation of plate-tectonic reconstructions, seismic tomography, geodynamic model outputs and other geodata through geological time.
