Here are all the latest EarthByte news posts. See News Archive for recent years.
EarthByte also publishes the ‘GPlates News‘ newsletter every quarter. The GPlates newsletter contains features such as the latest GPlates updates, tutorials and datasets, EarthByte news highlights and much more! Click here to view the latest and past editions of ‘GPlates News‘, or subscribe to receive the newsletters.
Every 8 weeks we turn our attention to a Remarkable Region that deserves a spot in the scientific limelight. Following from the first entry which showcased the Eastern Mediterranean, we move further east, and back in time, to the realm of the Tethys. The southern and southeastern region of Eurasia represents one of the most tectonically complex areas in … Read more…
EarthByte has now released a list of Honours/Masters projects to be offered in 2018. These projects are outlined below. Project Title Supervisor(s) Dynamic Earth models, landscape dynamics and basin evolution in Australasia Dietmar Müller, Sabin Zahirovic, Tristan Salles, Rohit Chandra, Sally Cripps (Centre for Translational Data Science) Incorporating modern plate tectonic reconstructions into box models of the deep-time deep-Earth … Read more…
Author List: Patrice Rey, Luke Mondy, Guillaume Duclaux, Christian Teyssier, Donna Whitney, Marie Bocher, cécile Prigent. Citation: Rey, Patrice & Mondy, L & Duclaux, G & Teyssier, Christian & Whitney, Donna & Bocher, Marie & Prigent, cécile. (2017). The origin of contractional structures in extensional gneiss domes. 45. 263-266. 10.1130/G38595. Abstract: The juxtaposition of domains of shortening and extension at different … Read more…
Presented by Professor Dietmar Müller School of Geosciences, University of Sydney What makes our planet habitable? Rapid global environmental change compels us to better understand what makes Earth suitable for life. Find out how the Experimental Planet being developed by the EarthByte Group in the University of Sydney’s School of Geosciences, is exploring different pathways … Read more…
EarthByte’s seafloor age grid was recently featured on NOAA’s Science On a Sphere . Age of the Seafloor: The surface of the Earth is a mosaic of tectonic plates that move. New sea floor is created in areas where the plates pull apart, allowing new crustal material to be formed from the molten magma below … Read more…
Underworld’s new release! Check out Underworld 2.3.0b – available via Docker & GitHub. Check out Underworlds’s blog for change details. http://www.underworldcode.org/posts/StableRelease https://hub.docker.com/r/underworldcode/underworld2/ https://github.com/underworldcode/underworld2 Enhancements: Improved swarm reload times for parallel simulations. Efficiency improvements for large proc count (>128) parallel simulations. Faster algorithms for swarms with deformed mesh. Many updates to visualisation routines. Compressible Stokes general … Read more…
EarthByte welcomes Proffessor Gregory Houseman.
A recent trip to Iceland piqued Sylvia’s curiosity about nearly every geological feature she saw. Back in Sydney, she explored those features – volcanoes, geysers, earthquakes, tectonic plates – with Dietmar Muller, Professor of Geophysics at the University of Sydney. That conversation went to air on Arts Wednesday 16 August 2017 and you can listen … Read more…
The Encyclopedia of Marine Geosciences was selected for the 2017 Mary B. Ansari Best Geoscience Research Resource Work Award of The Geoscience Information Society (GSIS). The formal award will be given at the GSA 2017 conference in October in Seattle/USA. EarthByters Dietmar Muller and Maria Seton contributed two chapters on “Paleophysiography of Ocean Basins” and “Plate Motion”. This Encyclopedia … Read more…
Final year undergraduate student, Madison East is based in the School of Geosciences EarthByte Group, a leading international collaboration between Australian universities, industry partners and centres of excellence. “I began a research scholarship with Dietmar Müller and the EarthByte Groupin the summer of 2016/17 looking at how subduction zones have evolved since the Jurassic,” said … Read more…
Author List: Michael Rubey, Sascha Brune, Christian Heine, Rhodri Davies, Simon Williams, and Dietmar Müller. Citation: Rubey, M., Brune, S., Heine, C., Davies, D. R., Williams, S. E., and Müller, R. D.: Global patterns in Earth’s dynamic topography since the Jurassic: the role of subducted slabs, Solid Earth, 8, 899-919, https://doi.org/10.5194/se-8-899-2017, 2017. Abstract: We evaluate the spatial … Read more…
Available Summer Scholarships Applications from 2nd or 3rd year University of Sydney students studying geoscience are invited to apply for summer scholarship positions with EarthByte. These projects bring undergraduate students into active research projects, and provide valuable insight into the inner workings of dynamic teams working on real-world problems. Research projects run for a duration … Read more…
Avid traveller and explorer, geophysicist Dr Tristan Salles, discusses his childhood in Africa and his experiences as an early-career researcher. What is your background, and why did you decide to join the University? I grew up in Africa, living in Madagascar, Cameroon and Senegal before moving to France at 17. My dad was an avid lepidopterist [the … Read more…
Abstract The motion of plates and continents on the planet’s surface are a manifestation of long-term mantle convection and plate tectonics. Present-day plate velocities provide a snapshot of this ongoing process, and have been used to infer controlling factors on the speeds of plates and continents. However, present-day velocities do not capture plate behaviour over … Read more…
Applications are invited for summer internships with Chevron. The program offers students the opportunity to work collaboratively with a team to discover new energy reserves by focusing on a producing field or exploration project. The intake is from late November to February (12 Weeks) during the summer vacation period. The work will be paid, with … Read more…
EarthByter Andrew Merdith, Alan Collins from the Univ. of Adelaide and colleagues produced an animated plate tectonic map that changes the history of our planet as we know it. Of course it’s not just an animation, it’s an elaborate computer model that took years to be built, assimilating tons of geological and geophysical observations, in a … Read more…
Abstract The present-day seismic structure of the mantle under the North Atlantic Ocean indicates that the Iceland hotspot represents the surface expression of a deep mantle plume, which is thought to have erupted in the North Atlantic domain during the Palaeocene. The spatial and temporal evolution of the plume since its eruption is still highly … Read more…
Applications are invited for a 2-year postdoctoral fellowship working as a member of the EarthByte Group in the School of Geosciences as part of the Basin Genesis Hub, an ARC-Industrial Transformation Research Hub. The position will focus on geodynamic modelling relevant for understanding the dynamics of basin evolution. This will include regional thermo-mechanical models of … Read more…
The recent Australian-New Zealand IODP Consortium workshop organised jointly with the School of Geosciences, University of Sydney was the largest Australasian workshop for scientific ocean drilling on record with about 100 attendees from 12 countries, including Australia, New Zealand, New Caledonia, Japan, India, Germany, Great Britain, France, Denmark, Sweden, Canada, and the USA, with the youngest attendee being only … Read more…
Tristan Salles from the School of Geosciences, University of Sydney has been announced as one of four winners of the 2017 Artemis high-performance computing challenge, securing over $2Mio worth of CPU hours over 4 years. Tristan and his collaborators from the EarthByte Group and the Centre for Translational Data Science were allocated the equivalent of … Read more…
Author List: Dietmar Müller, Rakib Hassan, Michael Garnis, Nicolas Flament, Simon Williams. Citation: Müller, Dietmar & Hassan, Rakib & Gurnis, M & Flament, Nicolas & Williams, Simon. (2018). Dynamic topography of passive continental margins and their hinterlands since the Cretaceous. Gondwana Research. . 10.1016/j.gr.2017.04.028. Abstract: Even though it is well accepted that the Earth’s surface topography has been … Read more…
Several EarthByters presented talks at the Rodinia 2017 conference in Townsville, including Dietmar Müller, Andrew Merdith, Simon Williams, Mike Tetley and Nicolas Flament. The conference was opened by two talks by Alan Collins (Univ. Adelaide) and Andrew, presenting their new Proterozoic Rodinia plate model with continuously closing plate boundaries that were recently published in Gondwana … Read more…
Dietmar Müller appointed as Director of the Sydney Informatics Hub. Professor Dietmar Müller has been appointed as the new director of the University’s Sydney Informatics Hub. One of seven Core Research Facilities, the Sydney Informatics Hub offers expertise and capabilities from the University’s High Performance Computing cluster, Artemis, and the Centre for Translational Data Science, … Read more…
The Australasian Universities Geoscience Educators Network (AUGEN) 2017 conference will be held at the University of Sydney on 5-6 August. The conference aims to bring together geoscience educators from the primary and high school sector, as well as educators and researchers from the tertiary sector. Please register for FREE at this link by 21 July … Read more…
Read the story of Dietmar in this week’s edition of Crinkling News, Australia’s only newspaper for kids. He located a photo of himself and his family when he was a kid to share his story of what inspired him to become a scientist. Crinkling News is posted out weekly to 800 Australian schools and has 30,000 young readers. They have … Read more…
A big congratulations to our students who were awarded at Student Award Night 2017. Well done Amy, Mandi, Nicky, Madison, Samantha, Jodie and Rebecca!
Prof Dietmar Muller, EarthByter at the School of Geosciences, University of Sydney, was elected a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science for his work on charting the evolution of the Earth through deep time. He is a world-leading geophysicist whose research has transformed our understanding of the Earth’s evolution over the past 200 million years. … Read more…
Global climate underwent a major reorganization when the Antarctic ice sheet expanded ~14 million years ago (Ma). This event affected global atmospheric circulation, including the strength and position of the westerlies and the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), and, therefore, precipitation patterns. Stephen Gallagher, a member of the ARC Basin Genesis Hub node at the Univ. … Read more…
EarthByters selected as exceptional reviewers for GSA journals Several Australian geologists and geophysicists have been selected as exceptional reviewers for Geological Society of America journals, for prompt, insightful, meticulous, and tactful reviews. Nicolas Flament was selected for his reviews of Lithosphere papers, and Dietmar Muller for Geosphere reviews. Other Australians honoured for their quality reviews … Read more…
During the second week of May, Earthbyte Alumnus Nicholas Barnett-Moore visited a research group at the National University of Colombia, Medellín, under the coordination of Assistant Professor Agustin Cardona and Associate Professor Gaspar Monsalve to teach a one-week intensive course on the plate reconstruction software, GPlates. The primary research interests of this group were focused … Read more…