A new paper by Basin Hub Member Gilles Brocard and co-authors on the paleo-seismicity of the North America-Caribbean plate boundary in Guatemala was published in Scientific Reports earlier this week. … Read more…
News
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.
NW Shelf Basin Hub workshop at Curtin University
A number of Basin Hub members have gathered at Curtin University in Perth to brainstorm and discuss progress on research relating to the tectonic and surface process evolution of the NW Australian shelf. Our PhD student Amy I’Anson sends these photos of the team using Curtin’s spectacular HIVE 24 megapixel screen. Very cool! … Read more…
Dietmar Müller awarded Vice–Chancellor’s Award for Outstanding Research
Dietmar Müller was awarded one of four 2016 Vice–Chancellor’s Award for Outstanding Research at the University of Sydney’s first annual award ceremony on the 25th of October. The award reflects many years of inspired, highly productive team work by the entire EarthByte Group, without whom this would not have been possible. It’s really an award for all EarthByters! … Read more…
GPlates 2.0 software and data sets
GPlates is a free desktop software for the interactive visualisation of plate-tectonics. The compilation and documentation of GPlates 2.0 data was primarily funded by AuScope National Collaborative Research Infrastructure (NCRIS).
GPlates is developed by an international team of scientists and professional software developers at the EarthByte Project (part of AuScope) at the University of Sydney, the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences (GPS) at CalTech, the Geodynamics team at the Geological Survey of Norway (NGU) and the Centre for Earth Evolution and Dynamics (CEED) at the University of Oslo. … Read more…
EarthByte Honours Projects 2017
EarthByte has now released a list of Honours projects to be offered in 2017. These projects are outlined below.
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Basin Genesis Hub surface processes workshop
Greetings from the surface processes workshop using the open-source Badlands code developed by our very own Tristan Salles as part of the Basin GENESIS Hub. Today we covered how to use Docker/Kitematic to download the pyBadlands virtual machine and run the examples (mountain building, delta formation, and so on). … Read more…
Jiabao Zhang’s summer internship in the Basin Genesis Hub
Jiabao Zhang, bachelor student at the University of Geosciences in Wuhan, China, visited the Basin Genesis Hub for a month in September 2016 to practice numerical modelling in geomorphology under the supervision of Dr Gilles Brocard and Dr Tristan Salles. … Read more…
Surface Processes Modelling Workshop
The EarthByte Group will conduct a 2 days workshop on surface processes modelling on the 13th and 14th of October in the Madsen Building at the School of Geoscience, The University of Sydney, Australia.
The workshop aims to introduce those interested in landscape evolution and source to sink problems to a new open-source code: Badlands. Note that you do not have to be a seasoned modeller to participate. Geomorphologists, tectonicists and sedimentologists interested in testing conceptual models based on field observations are welcome! … Read more…
EarthByte Welcomes Ömer Bodur
EarthByte Welcomes new PhD candidate Ömer Bodur.
Deep Carbon Modelling Workshop
Date: August 29 – 30 2016 Venue: The University of Sydney Description: A two-day workshop bringing together climate and geo-scientists from around Sydney and international collaborators on the DCO-funded Deep Carbon Modelling project. Deep carbon science describes the multi-disciplinary effort to unravel the dynamic interactions of carbon-bearing systems in deep time. The workshop will focus on exploring the interplays … Read more…
Taking the pulse of the global ocean
When organic particles sink from the surface ocean to the seafloor, a small but significant proportion of atmospheric carbon is stored away. Adriana Dutkiewicz and colleagues at the University of Sydney and Data61/CSIRO have now used global data sets collected over decades combined with cutting-edge big data analysis to understand how this process depends on surface ocean environments. … Read more…
Commotion in the deep Southern Ocean
Congratulations Adriana Dutkiewicz, Dietmar Müller, Andrew Hogg, and Paul Spence for their recent paper published in Geology. Their paper, Vigorous deep-sea currents cause global anomaly in sediment accumulation in the Southern Ocean, revealed an enormous stretch of the Southern Ocean where sediments are building up at a rate that dwarfs other deep ocean locations. The work has attracted the attention of media internationally. … Read more…
Commotion in the deep Southern Ocean
A team led by the University of Sydney School of Geosciences has found an 8,000-km long sediment pile-up in the middle of the Southern Ocean, making this feature unique in the world. Their study was published today in the leading international journal Geology. … Read more…
The pains and strains of a continental breakup in the media
Congratulations to Dr Sascha Brune, Dr Simon Williams, Dr Nathan Butterworth, and Prof Dietmar Müller on their paper published in Nature earlier this week. The paper, Abrupt plate accelerations shape rifted continental margins, has been picked up by the media across the globe.
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Welcome Back RV Investigator
Welcome back to the geoscience crew from the ECOSAT II voyage on the RV Investigator! After braving close to 10 meter high waves and over 50 knot winds on their approach into Hobart, the team made it back safely with an impressive haul of rocks, geophysical data and the experience of a lifetime. … Read more…
The pains and strains of a continental breakup
Every now and then in Earth’s history, a pair of continents draws close enough to form one. There comes a time, however, when they must inevitably part ways. Now scientists at Australia’s EarthByte research group, in collaboration with the German Research Centre for Geosciences, have revealed the underlying mechanics of a continental breakup when this … Read more…
Dietmar Müller finalist for AuScope Excellence in Research Award
Recently the Australian geoscience community celebrated a decade of AuScope achievements. EarthByte’s very own Prof Dietmar Muller was an award finalist for excellence in scientific research and providing tools (such as GPlates) that enable scientific development in our community. GPlates is an open-source and cross-platform tool that is accessible to high school teachers, research scientists and anyone … Read more…
Nicky Wright at Urbino Summer School in Paleoclimatology
PhD Candidate Nicky Wright is currently in Italy attending The 13th Urbino Summer School in Paleoclimatology. The summer school aims to provide early-career researchers with advanced working knowledge on paleobiological and geochemical proxy data and their use in reconstructing and modelling of past climate.
EarthByte Welcomes Rebecca Mcgirr
EarthByte welcomes new research assistant Rebecca Mcgirr to the group.
EarthByte Welcomes Rhiannon Garrett
EarthByte welcomes new PhD student Rhiannon Garrett.
Research voyage onboard the RV Investigator
Bon voyage! Today, a group of scientists, headed by Dr. Simon Williams from the School of Geosciences, have boarded Australia’s state-of-the-art marine research vessel, the , for a 14-day voyage. The voyage departed from Lautoka, Fiji and is currently headed towards the Fairway Ridge, an uplifted but submerged part of the Lord Howe Rise, northwest of New Caledonia. … Read more…
Solving Earth’s giant jigsaw puzzle of tectonic plates
Plate tectonics drives earthquakes and volcanism, forms precious mineral deposits and controls the planet’s long-term carbon cycle. But why do we have just a few large plates, and many tiny plates? Does it matter? These questions have now been answered in a French-Swiss-Australian collaborative paper led by PhD student Claire Mallard at the Univ. Lyon, published on 15 June 2016 in the journal Nature. The paper includes Nicolas Coltice (Lyon), EarthByters Dietmar Müller and Maria Seton, and Paul Tackley (ETH).
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How the Hawaiian-Emperor seamount chain got its spectacular bend
In a paper published in Nature, Rakib Hassan with fellow EarthByters Dietmar Müller, Simon E. Williams & Nicolas Flament, and Caltech’s Michael Gurnis, proposed a solution to a long standing geological mystery – how the distinct bend in the Hawaiian-Emperor Seamount Chain came to be. Using NCI’s Raijin supercomputer, the research team simulated flow patterns in the Earth’s mantle over the past 100 million years. The convection model suggests that the history of subduction has a profound effect on the time-dependent deformation of the edges of the Large Low-Shear Velocity Province (LLSVP) under the Pacific. The Hawaiian plume originates from the edge of this province and the southward migration of the plume during the formation of the Emperor chain reflects the migration of the northern edge of the LLSVP before ~47 million years ago.
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Bailey Payten awarded ASEG NSW Student Scholarship
Congratulations to Honours student Bailey Payten who has been awarded an Australian Society of Exploration Geophysicists (ASEG) NSW Student Scholarship! Bailey’s Honours project aims to investigate the rifting of the Lord Howe Rise from Gondwana using numerical modelling. As part of his project Bailey recently had the opportunity to participate in a survey of the deep structure of the Lord Howe … Read more…
Joanna Tobin awarded ASEG NSW Student Scholarship
Congratulations to Honours student Jo Tobin who has been awarded the Australian Society of Exploration Geophysicists (ASEG) NSW Student Scholarship! The aim of the scholarship is to promote and encourage geophysics related research and education. Jo’s Honours project focuses on the numerical simulation of the Papuan fold and thrust belt. The project involves the use of Underworld software, and looks at … Read more…
Geologists Discover How Australia’s Highest Mountain Formed
Congratulations to Prof Dietmar Müller, Dr Nicolas Flament, Dr Kara Matthews, Dr Simon Williams, and Prof Michael Gurnis on their paper recently published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters. Their paper, Formation of Australian continental margin highlands driven by plate-mantle interaction, has featured in a variety of Australian and international media outlets.
PLOS ONE – The GPlates Portal: Cloud-Based Interactive 3D Visualization of Global Geophysical and Geological Data in a Web Browser
Author List: Dietmar Müller, Xiaodong Qin, David Sandwell, Adriana Dutkiewicz, Simon Williams, Nicolas Flament, Stefan Maus, Maria Seton Citation: Müller, R. D., Qin, X., Sandwell, D. T., Dutkiewicz, A., Williams, S. E., Flament, N., Maus, S., & Seton, M. (2016). The GPlates Portal: Cloud-Based Interactive 3D Visualization of Global Geophysical and Geological Data in a Web Browser. … Read more…
Earth and Planetary Science Letters – Formation of Australian continental margin highlands driven by plate–mantle interaction
Author List: Dietmar Müller, Nicolas Flament, Kara Matthews, Simon Williams and Mike Gurnis Citation: Müller, R. D., Flament, N., Matthews, K. J., Williams, S. E., & Gurnis, M. (2016). Formation of Australian continental margin highlands driven by plate–mantle interaction. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 441, 60–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.epsl.2016.02.025 Formation of Australian continental margin highlands driven by plate–mantle … Read more…
Geophysical Research Letters – Alignment between seafloor spreading directions and absolute plate motions through time
Author List: Simon Williams, Nicolas Flament and Dietmar Müller Citation: Williams, S., Flament, N., & Müller, R. D. (2016). Alignment between seafloor spreading directions and absolute plate motions through time. Geophysical Research Letters, 43, 1472–1480, doi:10.1002/2015GL067155. Alignment between seafloor spreading directions and absolute plate motions through time
Earth-Science Reviews – The Late Cretaceous to recent tectonic history of the Pacific Ocean basin
Wright, N. M., Seton, M., Williams, S. E., & Müller, R. D. (2016). The Late Cretaceous to recent tectonic history of the Pacific Ocean basin. Earth-Science Reviews, 154, 138–173. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.earscirev.2015.11.015 The Late Cretaceous to recent tectonic history of the Pacific Ocean basin