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.
The recent article on the GPlates Portal published in PLOS ONE by Prof Dietmar Müller, Xiaodong Qin, Prof David Sandwell, Dr Adriana Dutkiewicz, Dr Simon Williams, Dr Nicolas Flament, Dr Stefan Maus, and Dr Maria Seton, has received significant international media attention over the past week, featuring in articles from Australia, UK, US, India, and UAE!
See the list of online media below, and check out the interactive globes yourself!
How did Madagascar once slot next to India? Where was Australia a billion years ago?
Cloud-based virtual globes developed by a team led by University of Sydney geologists mean anyone with a smartphone, laptop or computer can now visualise, with unprecedented speed and ease of use, how the Earth evolved geologically.
Reported today in PLOS ONE, the globes have been gradually made available since September 2014. Some show Earth as it is today while others allow reconstructions through ‘geological time’, harking back to the planet’s origins.
Uniquely, the portal allows an interactive exploration of supercontinents. It shows the breakup and dispersal of Pangea over the last 200 million years. It also offers a visualisation of the supercontinent Rodinia, which existed 1.1 billion years ago. Rodinia gradually fragmented, with some continents colliding again more than 500 million years later to form Gondwanaland.
EarthByte welcomes Ian Howson to the group. He will be working with us as a software developer on the Badlands Project
The link below points to an article written about EarthByte and GPlates by a Spanish journalist. The article is titled: “Viaje en una máquina del tiempo virtual a la Tierra de hace 1.000 millones de años: … which translates into: Travel in a virtual time machine to Earth 1,000 million years ago. http://m.eldiario.es/hojaderouter/ciencia/gplates-pangea-geologia-historia-Tierra-big_data_0_482951817.html Buenos dias todos … Read more…
Congratulations to PhD candidate Mike Tetley who was awarded a 34th International Geological Congress Travel Grant Scheme for Early-Career Australian and New Zealand Geoscientists. The funds will go towards his current 12-month research visit to Caltech where he is working with Prof Mike Gurnis, a world leader in Earth Dynamics, to study the evolution of … Read more…
The first beta release of pygplates (the GPlates Python library) is now available for download.
pygplates enables access to GPlates functionality via the Python programming language. This may be of particular use to researchers requiring more flexibility than is provided by the GPlates user interface.
The following pygplates functionality is available:-
EarthByte welcomes new Research Assistant Sebastiano ‘Sam’ Doss to the group. Sebastiano is currently working on the Deep Carbon Observatory project, investigating the interaction of subduction zones with carbonate platforms over time in connection to CO2 flux in the atmosphere.
EarthByte welcomes new Research Assistant Sebastiano ‘Sam’ Doss to the group. Sebastiano is currently working on the Deep Carbon Observatory project, investigating the interaction of subduction zones with carbonate platforms over time in connection to CO2 flux in the atmosphere.
The EarthByte group has been awarded 11 million computing hours, representing the equivalent of k$AU440, to carry out research for the Basin GENESIS Hub on the supercomputers Raijin (National Computational Infrastructure) and Magnus (Pawsey Supercomputing Centre) for 2016 through the National Computational Merit Allocation Scheme (7.25 MSUs, one of the top 4 allocations across all disciplines … Read more…
EarthByte Welcomes visiting student Xianshi Cao.
The GPlates Portal has received a major facelift, using state-of-the-art web design. The primary design principle of the new front page is to convey the most important information to users in an effective way. The new grid layout guarantees the presentation of information is always in a user readable format on the screen of any … Read more…
NASA Earth Observatory features a piece on the recent Mammerickx Microplate discovery. Their Image of the Day for 13 January 2016 is a satellite gravity map of the Indian Ocean, and the associated article, entitled ‘New Seafloor Map Helps Scientists Find New Features‘, discusses the power of satellite data for seafloor mapping and details the … Read more…
Author List: Kara Matthews, Dietmar Müller and David Sandwell Citation: Matthews, K. J., Müller, R. D., & Sandwell, D. T. (2016). Oceanic microplate formation records the onset of India–Eurasia collision. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 433, 204-214. Oceanic microplate formation records the onset of India–Eurasia collision
An article discussing GPlates and research that EarthByte is involved in has been featured on the IFL Science! website entitled ‘Incredibly Detailed, Billion-Year-Old Ancient Maps Of Earth Produced By Researchers‘.
Course Overview
This course is designed to introduce students to different types of spatial data, data processing and interpolation functions and data plotting using GMT (Generic Mapping Tools). GMT is a set of public domain tools that will be used in conjunction with UNIX general processing tools (awk, grep) and basic shell programming. The examples presented in the course will focus on marine geophysical data, however many of the principles are applicable to other scientific data.
The learning outcomes for the course include: … Read more…
A Software Developer position is available at EarthByte. The position will focus on the development, engineering, and maintenance of complex open-source, surface processes and geodynamics modelling software for the ARC-ITRH Basin GENESIS Hub. The total package offered is $100K-$127K p.a. for a full-time, fixed term 12 months (renewal possible). Applications close 24 January 2016. Click … Read more…
Time machine: History and current advances in reconstructing the Earth through deep geological time – an article on Quartz by Steve LeVine. The article is a review of the development of ideas and technologies in reconstructing the Earth through deep time, aimed at understanding supercontinent assembly, breakup and dispersal, starting with Alfred Wegener. The article focusses on research activities in the context of the IGCP 648 project ‘Supercontinent Cycles and Global Geodynamics‘ led by Zheng-Xiang Li. The piece provides some historical context, and highlights the work of a number of leading scientists, postdoctoral researchers and PhD students currently involved in this work. … Read more…
EarthByte welcomes visiting student Amy l’Anson.
The recent EPSL article on the discovery of the Mammerickx Microplate, by Dr Kara Matthews, Prof Dietmar Müller and Prof David Sandwell, has received lots of media attention from many different countries around the world including Australia, UK, USA, India, Pakistan, Mexico, Nepal and Honduras.
See below for a list of media items:
Online Media
The biggest continental collision in Earth’s history: Scientists pinpoint crashing together of continents that created the Himalayas 50 million years ago – Daily Mail
Scientists fix date for earth-shattering Himalayan birth pangs – The Sydney Morning Herald
Microplate discovery dates birth of Himalayas – EurekAlert!
Himalayas: Discovery of first ancient Indian Ocean microplate hints at new date of formation of mountain range – Yahoo! News … Read more…
EarthByte welcomes Sally Carney from the University of Wollongong who has just started a 6 week summer scholarship in the EarthByte group working with Dr Maria Seton on the evolution of the Panama gateway.
A big congratulations to PhD student Nicky Wright who was awarded the Chris Powell Medal for Postgraduate Research in Tectonics and Structural Geology from the Geological Society of Australia SGTSG. The medal is awarded at each regular field conference of the SGTSG for an outstanding research paper arising from postgraduate research on some aspect of … Read more…
EarthByte welcomes Megan Korchinski, a visiting PhD student from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA. Megan will be studying with us for the next 3 months at the University of Sydney. Megan is part of the Structure Tectonics And Metamorphic Petrology (STAMP) research group, and is interested in the exhumation mechanisms of subducted continental crust. … Read more…
Long-term EarthByte collaborator, Prof Mike Gurnis (Caltech), is part of a team that has just received the prestigious Gordon Bell Prize for pushing the boundaries of supercomputing in the application of the most realistic numerical model of mantle convection and plate tectonics. Related News IBM wants to predict earthquakes and volcanoes with Watson Gordon Bell … Read more…
An international team of scientists led by the University of Sydney’s School of Geosciences has discovered that the crustal stresses caused by the initial collision between India and Eurasia cracked the Antarctic Plate far away from the collisional zone and broke off a fragment the size of Tasmania in a remote patch of the central Indian Ocean.
The ongoing tectonic collision between the two continents produces enormous geological stresses that build up along the Himalayas and lead to numerous earthquakes every year – but now scientists have unravelled how stressed the Indian Plate became 47 million years ago when its northern edge first collided with Eurasia. … Read more…
EarthByte has now released a list of projects for potential Honours students for 2016. The project topics span: The role of mechanical stratigraphy in the structural style of deformed sedimentary basins Understanding the formation Earth’s largest continental ribbon: The Lord Howe Rise Evolution of the Australian climate and landscape over the last 100 Myr Unravelling … Read more…
Version 5.2 of the Generic Mapping Tools (GMT) software was released today! GMT is the widely used open-source software for manipulating and visualising geographic and cartesian data. The latest EarthByte global plate rotation model (Müller et al., in press) is now the default rotation model used in the GMT ‘SPOTTER‘ supplement.
Congratulations to Dr Nicolas Flament for being awarded a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) from the Australian Research Council!
Below are some details about Nico’s project (2016-2019) entitled ‘The geodynamics of past sea level changes‘:
This project is designed to quantify the effect of flow deep within Earth’s interior on past sea-level changes and on the flooding history of Australia over the last 550 million years. The rise and fall of sea level has shaped our planet over time. This project plans to combine recent advances in tectonic reconstructions and dynamic Earth models with the global and Australian rock record. … Read more…
A Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) Proposal, designed to study the interaction of subduction zones with carbonate platforms through time in terms of CO2 cycles, submitted to the Smithsonian Institution and prepared to a large extent by Dr Sabin Zahirovic and EarthByte Research Assistant Jodie Pall, was successful, raising $US36k. The DCO actually doubled our proposed budget from … Read more…
The Basin GENESIS Hub was featured in NCI’s Newsletter entitled ‘Basin GENESIS Hub Launched‘. NCI Director Professor Lindsay Botten said NCI’s role in the Hub highlighted the importance of high-performance computing in industry-relevant research. “NCI is delighted to support this high-profile ARC Industry Transformation Hub, led by Professor Müller,” Professor Botten said. “Projects of this excellence, and … Read more…
Congratulations to the EarthByte Honours students for submitting their theses and delivering their final presentations! Well done Carmen, Mandi, Jono, Nikita and Luke!
