Here are all the latest EarthByte news posts. See News Archive for recent years.
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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…
EarthByte welcomes visiting student Li Wan.
Sydney Research Excellence Initiative grant (2017-2018) Research area, key questions, significance, and innovation. The planet is experiencing a major transition from an icehouse climate, one dominated by permanent continental ice sheets at high latitudes, to a greenhouse climate that favours ice-free conditions. Although part of the deglaciation trend is influenced by a natural orbital cycle, … Read more…
Date: June 13-16, 2017 Venue: The University of Sydney The workshop is co-organised by Neville Exon (Australian National University), Karsten Gohl (Alfred Wegener Institut), Michael Gurnis (California Institute of Technology), Stuart Henrys (GNS Science, Wellington), Fumio Inagaki (JAMSTEC), Rob McKay (Victoria University, Wellington), Dietmar Mueller (University of Sydney, Conference Host), Dhananjai Pandey (NCAOR, India), Amelia … Read more…
In 2016, the EarthByte group, based in the School of Geosciences at the University of Sydney, created a visualization tool and model to measure the interactions of arc volcanism with buried carbonate platforms in deep time. The new workflow tools, which are available to the DCO community, enable scientists to approximate paleo-atmospheric CO2 flux within … Read more…
In response to ever-rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, some countries are exploring carbon sequestration as a way to mitigate the effects of this greenhouse gas. The general strategy is to inject carbon dioxide more than a mile underground, beneath an impermeable rock layer, where it can dissolve into fluids and crystallize. Injection locations … Read more…
A team of students from the WA School of Mines, Curtin University, has picked up the bronze medal in the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) Imperial Barrel Award competition in Houston, Texas. The Imperial Barrel Award (IBA) is an annual competition for geoscience graduate students from universities around the world, simulating the exploration work … Read more…
EarthByte welcomes new PhD candidate Michael Fletcher.
Mitigating global warming by CO2 storage? Check for the continental stressitis. If proposed CO2 sites are not properly assessed for long-term stability, future civilisations could still suffer the consequences of global warming. Professor Dietmar Müller from the School of Geosciences at the University of Sydney and Scott Dyksterhuis from ExxonMobil have created a computer model … Read more…
EarthByte welcomes new Research Assistants Samuel Russell.