Dr Christian Heine

Overseas Collaborator

See below for EarthByte content related to Christian.

Tectonics: Modeling Lithospheric Thickness Along the Conjugate South Atlantic Passive Margins Implies Asymmetric Rift Initiation

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The lithospheric architecture of passive margins is crucial for understanding the tectonic processes that caused the breakup of Gondwana. We highlight the evolution of the South Atlantic passive margins by a simple thermal lithosphere-asthenosphere boundary (LAB) model based on onset and cessation of rifting, crustal thickness, and stretching factors. We simulate lithospheric thinning and select … Read more…

Subduction history reveals Cretaceous slab superflux as a possible cause for the mid-Cretaceous plume pulse and superswell events

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Abstract: Subduction is a fundamental mechanism of material exchange between the planetary interior and the surface. Despite its significance, our current understanding of fluctuating subducting plate area and slab volume flux has been limited to a range of proxy estimates. Here we present a new detailed quantification of subduction zone parameters from the Late Triassic … Read more…

Global patterns in Earth’s dynamic topography since the Jurassic: the role of subducted slabs

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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…

Evaluating global paleoshoreline models for the Cretaceous and Cenozoic

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Early CretaceousCitation
Heine, C., Yeo, L. G., & Müller, R. D. (2015). Evaluating global paleoshoreline models for the Cretaceous and Cenozoic. Australian Journal of Earth Sciences, (ahead-of-print), 1-13., doi: 10.1080/08120099.2015.1018321.

Summary
Paleoshoreline maps represent the distribution of land and sea through geologic time. These compilations provide excellent proxies for evaluating the contributions non-tectonic vertical crustal motions, such as mantle convection-driven dynamic topography, to the flooding histories of continental platforms. Until now, such data have not been available as a globally coherent compilation. Here, we present and evaluate a set of Cretaceous and Cenozoic global shoreline data extracted from two independent published global paleogeographic atlases. … Read more…

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Australian Journal of Earth Sciences – Evaluating global paleoshoreline models for the Cretaceous and Cenozoic

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Heine, C., Yeo, L. G., & Müller, R. D. (2015). Evaluating global paleoshoreline models for the Cretaceous and Cenozoic. Australian Journal of Earth Sciences, (ahead-of-print), 1-13. Evaluating global paleoshoreline models for the Cretaceous and Cenozoic Download the Paleocoastline files – zip file

Nature Communications – Rift migration explains continental margin assymetry and crustal hyper-extension

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Brune, S., Heine, C., Pérez-Gussinyé, M., & Sobolev, S. V. (2014). Rift migration explains continental margin asymmetry and crustal hyper-extension. Nature communications, 5. doi: 10.1038/ncomms5014. Rift migration explains continental margin asymmetry and crustal hyper-extension Download supplementary information – pdf

Rift migration explains continental margin asymmetry and crustal hyper-extension

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Rift MigrationWhen continents break apart, continental crust and lithosphere are thinned until break-up is achieved and an oceanic basin is formed. The most remarkable and least understood structures associated with this process are up to 200 km wide areas of hyper-extended continental crust, which are partitioned between conjugate margins with pronounced asymmetry. Here we show, using high-resolution thermo-mechanical modelling, that hyper-extended crust and margin asymmetry are produced by steady state rift migration. … Read more…

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Integrating deep-Earth and surface processes for frontier-basin exploration

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Project Summary
Sea level has changed by up to 300m through geological time. These fluctuations, caused by plate tectonics and convection in the Earth’s mantle, have created vast sedimentary basins and associated resources such as petroleum, natural gas and coal.

In this project, we propose to bring together global 4D databases with cutting-edge 3D numerical simulations to reconstruct how mid-ocean ridge creation and the recycling of old, cold oceanic plates into the mantle have driven surface topography and sea-level change globally since the breakup of the super-continent Pangaea. … Read more…

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Tectonophysics – Cenozoic uplift of South Western Australia as constrained by river profiles

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Barnett-Moore, N., Flament, N., Heine, C., Butterworth, N., & Müller, R. D. (2014). Cenozoic uplift of south Western Australia as constrained by river profiles. Tectonophysics, 622, 186-197. doi: 10.1016/j.tecto.2014.03.010. Cenozoic uplift of south Western Australia as constrained by river profiles

EarthByte publicity for Oblique rifting of the Equatorial Atlantic paper

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Summary FigureCongratulations to EarthByte’s Sascha Brune and Christian Heine (now at Shell in The Hague) who made it to the Sydney Uni front page with a media piece on “How the world missed out on a Saharan Atlantic ocean”, attracted international media attention and were chosen as a “Research Focus” in the current volume of Geology for their paper: Oblique rifting of the Equatorial Atlantic: Why there is no Saharan Atlantic Ocean. Well done! … Read more…

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Earth and Planetary Science Letters – Topographic assymetry of the South Atlantic from global models of mantle flow and lithospheric stretching

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Flament, N., Gurnis, M., Williams, S., Seton, M., Skogseid, J., Heine, C., & Müller, R. D. (2014). Topographic asymmetry of the South Atlantic from global models of mantle flow and lithospheric stretching. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 387, 107-119. dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.epsl.2013.11.017. Topographic asymmetry of the South Atlantic from global models of mantle flow and lithospheric stretching … Read more…

Topographic asymmetry of the South Atlantic from global models of mantle flow and lithospheric stretching

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Flament et al EPSL 2014 - FigureCitation
Flament, N., Gurnis, M., Williams, S., Seton, M., Skogseid, J., Heine, C., & Müller, R. D. (2014). Topographic asymmetry of the South Atlantic from global models of mantle flow and lithospheric stretching. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 387, 107-119. dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.epsl.2013.11.017.

Abstract
The relief of the South Atlantic is characterized by elevated passive continental margins along southern Africa and eastern Brazil, and by the bathymetric asymmetry of the southern oceanic basin where the western flank is much deeper than the eastern flank. We investigate the origin of these topographic features in the present and over time since the Jurassic with a model of global mantle flow and lithospheric deformation. The model progressively assimilates plate kinematics, plate boundaries and lithospheric age derived from global tectonic reconstructions with deforming plates, and predicts the evolution of mantle temperature, continental crustal thickness, long-wavelength dynamic topography, and isostatic topography. … Read more…

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Geology – Oblique rifting of the Equatorial Atlantic: Why there is no Saharan Atlantic Ocean

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Heine, C., & Brune, S. (2014). Oblique rifting of the Equatorial Atlantic: why there is no Saharan Atlantic Ocean. Geology, 42(3), 211-214. doi:10.1130/G35082.1 107-199. Oblique rifting of the Equatorial Atlantic: why there is no Saharan Atlantic Ocean Access supporting data (ref. 2014073)

Journal of Geodynamics – Geological, tomographic, kinematic and geodynamic constraints on the dynamics of sinking slabs

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Butterworth, N. P., Talsma, A. S., Müller, R. D., Seton, M., Bunge, H. P., Schuberth, B. S. A., … & Heine, C. (2014). Geological, tomographic, kinematic and geodynamic constraints on the dynamics of sinking slabs. Journal of Geodynamics, 73, 1-13. doi: 10.1016/j.jog.2013.10.006. Geological, tomographic, kinematic and geodynamic constraints on the dynamics of sinking slabs Supplementary material

Geoscientific Instrumentation Methods and Data Systems – The GPlates geological information model and markup language

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Qin, X., Müller, R. D., Cannon, J., Landgrebe, T. C. W., Heine, C., Watson, R. J., & Turner, M. (2012). The GPlates geological information model and markup language. Geosci. Instrum. Methods Data Syst. Discuss, 2, 365-428. doi:10.5194/gi-1-111-2012. Download the paper – pdf

Eastern Australasian Basins Symposium IV – Plate Tectonic Consequences of competing models for the origin and history of the Banda Sea subducted oceanic lithosphere

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Heine, C., Quevedo, L., McKay, H., & Müller, R. D. (2012). Plate Tectonic Consequences of competing models for the origin and history of the Banda Sea subducted oceanic lithosphere. arXiv preprint arXiv:1210.4958. Download the paper – pdf

The IntraCONtinental basinS (ICONS) atlas

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The ICONS atlas is a collection of basin data for over 240 intracontinental sedimentary basins, displaying crustal structure data, computed extension factors and tectonic subsidence grids and derivatives thereof as well as the dynamic topography evolution of a given basin. The atlas was compiled by Christian Heine as part of his PhD project investigating the formation and … Read more…

EarthByte to attend GSA Fragile Earth conference 2011

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EarthByte group members Dietmar Müller, Christian Heine, Nicolas Flament, Aedon Talsma, Logan Yeo and Grace Shephard are attending the GSA Fragile Earth conference in Munich, Germany from 4-7 September, 2011. Click here for details about the GSA conference

EarthByte welcomes Fabian Stenzel

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The EarthByte group welcomes research student Fabian Stenzel from the Technical University Munich (Germany) who was awarded a competitive “RISE worldwide” scholarship (Research assistantships in Science and Engineering) from the German Academic Exchange Service DAAD. Fabian will be staying with the group for about 3 months and work together with Christian on assimilating global datasets … Read more…

EarthByte attends EGU 2011

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Post-docs Nicolas Flament, Christian Heine, Jo Whittaker and Simon Williams, along with students Ana Gibbons, Charmaine Thomas and Luke Mondy presented their research at the EGU General Assembly in Vienna, which this year attracted 10,725 scientists geoscientists. Christian Heine and Ana Gibbons co-chaired the session “Unresolved problems in plate tectonics: kinematic reconstructions, plate driving forces, … Read more…

IODP workshop on Indian Ocean Drilling scheduled for late 2011

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An Integrated Ocean Drilling (IODP) workshop on Indian Ocean Drilling to be held in late 2011 in Goa, India has just been approved, funded by $33,000 from IODP, and supported by the Australian IODP Office, which plans to send 15 Australians and Kiwis to the meeting, including EarthByte’s Dietmar Müller, and Stephen Gallagher (UMelb), Neville Exon (ANU), Richard Arculus (ANU), Mike Coffin (Tasmania) and Richard Wysoczanski (NZ, NIWA). The workshop is timed to suit an April 2012 drilling proposal submission deadline. … Read more…

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Integration of plate kinematic reconstructions in geodynamic models of mantle convection

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Project Summary
Despite more than 30 years of plate tectonics research, we still do not know exactly what drives the plates or controls the time-dependence of mantle convection. Plate motions are linked to processes in the deeper Earth interior by complex, enigmatic cause-and-effect relationships. While mantle convection is generally accepted as the underlying cause of plate motions, the geometry of mantle flow and its relation to plate motions remains poorly understood. As plate tectonics is the Earth Science paradigm, breakthroughs in this field affect understanding of all branches of Earth Science including formation and distribution of natural resources, long-term climate change and natural hazards. … Read more…

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Age and Bathymetry of the World’s Ocean Crust for the last 140 million years

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Muller etal Figure1Reconstructing vanished oceans
We establish the locations and geometry of mid ocean ridges through time on the basis of marine magnetic anomaly identifications, geological information such as paleomagnetic data from terranes and microcontinents, especially in the Tethys Ocean, mid-oceanic ridge subduction events and the rules of plate tectonics. Based on a global set of tectonic plate rotations we construct a set of refined seafloor isochrons following the interpolation technique outlined by Müller et al. (1997; 2008) but including a multitude of additional data. … Read more…

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Christian Heine awarded GSA Young Author’s Award

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Congratulations to Christian Heine who has been awarded the GSA Young Authors’ Award for 2005 for his paper in the Australian Journal of Earth Sceince (Heine C & M¸ller R D 2005. Late Jurassic rifting along the Australian North West Shelf: margin geometry and spreading ridge configuration. 52, 27-39). Christian won the David I Groves Award … Read more…