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.

G-Cubed: Papanin Ridge and Ojin Rise Seamounts (Northwest Pacific): Dual Hotspot Tracks Formed by the Shatsky Plume

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The origin of Shatsky Rise, a large igneous plateau in the NW Pacific, has long been debated. It could have either formed by shallow mantle melting due to its confirmed creation along a mid-ocean ridge or with additional contribution of deeper mantle material that upwelled as so-called mantle plume beneath the spreading ridge (“plume-ridge interaction”). … Read more…

STELLAR – Spatio TEmporaL expLorAtion for Resources

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Project STELLAR (Spatio TEmporaL expLorAtion for Resources) is a collaboration between BHP and the EarthByte Group aimed at implementing big and complex spatio-temporal data analysis and modelling to support the needs of BHP in global resource exploration. Split into multiple phases over the next 3.5 years, the project will connect BHP’s warehouse of global resource knowledge with … Read more…

International Association for Mathematical Geosciences (IAMG)’s Award Winners’ Talks

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Dr. Behnam Sadeghi,  in 2020, was introduced as the first recipient of the “Founders Scholarship” award of the International Association for Mathematical Geosciences (IAMG), now being presented annually to the most outstanding student or post-graduate scientist in the field of Mathematical Geosciences. This award is given in honor and memory of the individuals who participated … Read more…

Volcanoes acted as a safety valve for Earth’s long-term climate

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Volcanoes acted as a safety valve for Earth’s long-term climate The natural weathering of rocks on Earth’s surface over time is a crucial process for removing CO2 from the atmosphere Researchers have now used artificial intelligence to study interactions between land, sea and the atmosphere to determine the biggest drivers of this process over the … Read more…

Continental arcs dominate global chemical weathering

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Earth’s plate-tectonic activity regulates the carbon cycle and, hence, climate, via volcanic outgassing and silicate-rock weather- ing. Mountain building, arc–continent collisions and clustering of continents in the tropics have all been invoked as controlling the weathering flux, with arcs also acting as a major contributor of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. However, these processes have … Read more…

World Economic Forum: Watch how today’s continents were formed over one billion years – in just 40 seconds

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The plate tectonic theory says that Earth’s surface is made up of slabs of rock that are slowly shifting right under our feet. Because of this constant movement, today’s Earth looks a lot different from what it did millions of years ago. In 1912, German scientist Alfred Wegener proposed that Earth’s continents once formed a … Read more…

Download GPlates 2.3

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Welcome to the download page for GPlates 2.3. Information about this release may be found on the News page of the GPlates website. This page contains the following sections: Download file descriptions There are 12 download files consisting of: GPlates binary installers The binary installers include GPlates and the GPlates-compatible geodata. For Windows: For macOS: … Read more…

The Conversation: Travelling through deep time to find copper for a clean energy future

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More than 100 countries, including the United States and members of the European Union, have committed to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. The world is going to need a lot of metal, particularly copper. Recently, the International Energy Agency sounded the warning bell on the global supply of copper as the most widely used metal in renewable … Read more…

GPlates 2.3 software and data sets

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GPlates is a free desktop software for the interactive visualisation of plate-tectonics. The compilation and documentation of GPlates 2.3 data was primarily funded by AuScope National Collaborative Research Infrastructure (NCRIS).

GPlates is developed by the EarthByte Group (part of AuScope NCRIS) at the University of Sydney and the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences (GPS) at California Institute of Technology (CalTech). … Read more…

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Kinematics and extent of the Piemont–Liguria Basin – implications for subduction processes in the Alps

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Assessing the size of a former ocean of which only remnants are found in mountain belts is challenging but crucial to understanding subduction and exhumation processes. Here we present new constraints on the opening and width of the Piemont–Liguria (PL) Ocean, known as the Alpine Tethys together with the Valais Basin. We use a regional … Read more…

Predicting the emplacement of Cordilleran porphyry copper systems using a spatio-temporal machine learning model

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Porphyry copper (Cu) systems occur along magmatic belts derived in subduction zones. Our current under- standing of their formation is restricted to observations from the overriding plate, resulting in a knowledge gap in terms of processes occurring in convergence zones through time. An association between key tectonic processes and the timing and location of porphyry … Read more…

Potential encoding of coupling between Milankovitch forcing and Earth’s interior processes in the Phanerozoic eustatic sea-level record

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The driving mechanisms of Earth’s climate system at a multi-Myr timescale have received considerable attention since the 1980’s as they are deemed to control large-amplitude climatic variations that result in severe biogeochemical disruptions, major sea-level variations, and the evolution of Earth’s land- and seascapes through geological time. The commonly accepted mechanism for these changes derives … Read more…

Concentration-distance from centroids (C-DC) multifractal modeling: A novel approach to characterizing geochemical patterns based on sample distance from mineralization

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Behnam Sadeghi from EarthByte Group has published a new paper in journal “Ore Geology Reviews”, based on his PhD thesis. In this research, to explore the VMS Cu deposits throughout Sweden a novel multifractal model of concentration-distance from centroids (C-DC) has been developed and applied to the till data provided by the Geological Survey of … Read more…

Research Associate/Research Fellow in Exploration

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We are seeking to appoint an enthusiastic researcher at either a Level A or Level B to join the research team for the STELLAR project group (Spatio TEmporaL expLorAtion for Resources). STELLAR is a collaboration between BHP and the EarthByte Group at the University of Sydney aimed at implementing big and complex spatio-temporal data analysis … Read more…

Mantle plumes and their role in Earth processes

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The existence of mantle plumes was first proposed in the 1970s to explain intra-plate, hotspot volcanism, yet owing to difficulties in resolving mantle upwellings with geophysical images and discrepancies in interpretations of geochemical and geochronological data, the origin, dynamics and composition of plumes and their links to plate tectonics are still contested. In a recently … Read more…

Geochemical anomaly definition using multifractal modeling, validated by geological field observations: Siah Jangal area, SE Iran

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Dr. Behnam Sadeghi from EarthByte Group has published this paper recently in the journal “Geochemistry-Chemie der Erde” (Special Issue of “Mineral exploration: a journey from fieldwork, to laboratory work, computational modelling and mineral processing”). This research is part of a research project with the University of Neyshabur, which has been done in SE Iran. Abstract … Read more…

SPS Model: a significant algorithm to reduce the time and computer memory required in geostatistical simulations

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Behnam Sadeghi has published this paper in the Iranian Journal of Earth Sciences. In this research, he has developed an algorithm to down-scale the maps, to reduce the simulation time and the required memory, but to keep the same geostatistical performance and accuracy. This model strongly helps with huge and time-consuming simulations. Abstract In geochemical … Read more…

The carbonate compensation depth in the South Atlantic Ocean since the Late Cretaceous

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Carbonate accumulation rates (CAR) in the South Atlantic through time, with the average CCD for the South Atlantic shown in black, which the CCD in the Walvis Ridge/Rio Grande Rise area is shown in magenta. Deep-sea carbonate deposition is a complex process that is encapsulated in the carbonate compensation depth (CCD)—a facies boundary separating calcareous … Read more…

ANNOUNCING THE LAUNCH OF NEW GPLATES WEBSITE

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We are very excited to announce the launch of the newly designed GPlates website. Visit the new website at www.gplates.org. After a few months of team work and dedication, we have made the new GPlates website more responsive and more mobile-friendly. As the development team of the GPlates open source project, our goal with this … Read more…

Weighting of BLEG data with drainage and catchment properties to enhance Au anomalies

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Weighting of BLEG data with drainage and catchment properties to enhance Au anomalies Dr. Behnam Sadeghi with Profs. Huseyin Yilmaz and Franco Pirajno, has published this paper in journal “Geochemistry/Chemie der Erde”, based on bulk leachable extractable gold (BLEG) data in Western Turkey, considering several other relevant parameters such catchments’ areas, slopes and curvatures plus … Read more…

Category-based fractal modelling: A novel model to integrate the geology into the data for more effective processing and interpretation

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Category-based fractal modelling: A novel model to integrate the geology into the data for more effective processing and interpretation Dr. Behnam Sadeghi and his PhD supervisor, Prof. David Cohen, has published another paper in Journal of Geochemical Exploration. This paper is based on his PhD thesis. In this research, they have proposed two novel fractal … Read more…

Chatting about reconstructing 1 billion years of Earth evolution in Geology Bites podcast

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In the latest Geology Bites podcast series, Dietmar Muller talks about the challenges and benefits of reconstructing Earth evolution over a billion years with Oliver Strimpel, former astrophysicist and museum director, and Visiting Professor at the Department of Earth Sciences at Oxford University.  https://www.geologybites.com/ A transcript of the podcast can be found here.

Modelling global precipitation since 250 million years ago

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We have developed a novel data-driven approach to reconstruct precipitation patterns through geological time, since the supercontinent Pangea was in existence. Our approach involves linking climate-sensitive sedimentary deposits such as coal, evaporites and glacial deposits to a global plate model, reconstructed paleo-elevation maps and high-resolution General Circulation Models via Bayesian machine learning. We model the … Read more…

Nicolas Flament awarded the AAS Anton Hales medal

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Dr Nicolas Flament, University of Wollongong Dr Flament works at the interface between geodynamics and geology by novel 4D mathematical modelling of flow deep in Earth’s interior. He makes significant contributions to understanding our planet by connecting the evolution of the deep Earth with the evolution of its surface. He shows Earth was largely a water … Read more…

A geological postcard from Australia to Mars on NASA Perseverance

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How a bit of the Australian desert is destined for the Red Planet – A small piece of the Pilbara holds the secret to an ancient geological environment that was common to Earth and Mars 3.5 billion years ago. Find out how Patrice Rey from the School of Geosciences played a pivotal role in unearthing … Read more…