About EarthByte
The EarthByte Group is one of the world’s leading
research groups for global and regional plate
tectonic reconstructions and for studying the
interplay between the deep earth and surface
processes. Research is conducted in topics
as diverse as basin evolution, geodynamic controls
on ore deposit formation, continental deformation,
formation of Australian opal, causes of long-term
sea-level change and Phanerozoic plate tectonic
reconstructions. The EarthByte Group leads
the development of open-source plate
reconstruction software, GPlates (www.gplates.org).
GPlates enables the interactive manipulation
of plate-tectonic reconstructions and the
visualization of geodata through geological time,
and it facilitates interoperability of plate
tectonic data and models with geodynamic computing
services for applied and fundamental research
purposes.
EarthByte Latest
News/Publications
January 2013
Masterton, S., Gubbins.,
D., Müller, R.D. and Hemant, K., 2012, Forward
modelling of oceanic lithospheric magnetisation,
Geophysical Journal International, doi:
10.1093/gji/ggs063. Download
paper
December 2012
Paper published in Earth
Planet Science Letters: Matthews, K.J., Seton, M.,
Müller, R.D., 2012. A global-scale plate
reorganization event at 105-100 Ma. Earth Planet.
Sci. Lett. 355–356, 283-298. Download
paper
November 2012
Jo Whittaker explains the
Indo-Australian plate breakup to The
Age
Southern Surveyor cruise
takes the media by storm!
Maria Seton and her team are back from the Southern
Surveyor cruise in the Coral Sea, which was
investigating the tectonic framework for the
easternmost Coral Sea and northern extent of the
Lord Howe hotspot for 25 days. The cruise has been
featured on Radio
Australia, which was then
picked up by ABC
News, Sydney
Morning Herald and BBC.
October 2012
Michael Chin wins
NeCTAR/ANDS #nadojo competition for GPlates
Congratulations to Michael Chin
from the Earthbyte group on winning this year's
NeCTAR/ANDS #nadojo competition. Michael demonstrated
a new web-enabled GPlates prototype on the NECTAR/ANDS
eResearch computing infrastructure, porting some of
the powerful plate reconstruction capabilities to the
web. The new GPlates competed with several other
candidates from universities and research institutes
in Australia, and winning on the basis of the novelty
and future potential. A judge was quoted as saying:
"...being able to look at tectonic plates and how they
move over 140Ma years ago brought me back to that
child-like awe of wonder and amazement, like the first
time you look up at the stars and realise how many
(light?) years away they are..." Well done Michael!
The web-enabled GPlates demonstrator can be
experimented with online at here
August 2012
D. Müller, L. Quevedo
and T. Landgrebe from EarthByte have been successful
in applying for resources on the new iVEC
supercomputer "Fornax" located at UWA through a merit
allocation project built around GPlates new data
mining capabilities. GPlates performance as a
data-intensive application and its potential for
generating a high impact research outcome by taking
advantage of multicore GPU architectures have been key
to this grant. The proposal explores the distribution
of GPlates' in-built graphics acceleration across
multiple computing nodes equipped with
high-performance GPUs, to allow for real-time
reconstruction as well as large-scale data-mining and
statistical analyses of high-resolution raster data.
The application of these tools to geodata synthesis
through space and time, and the assimilation of
disparate geological and geophysical data into a
large-scale four-dimensional Earth models have
enormous relevance in the study of important
relationships through time pertaining to mineral
deposits and energy systems. Fornax (Latin for
'furnace') is the latest addition to the Pawsey Centre
Project infrastructure funded by the Australian
Government, as part of an $80 million Super Science
initiative aimed at providing new supercomputing
facilities and expertise to support SKA (Square
Kilometre Array) research and other high-end science.
The system procured from SGI comprises 96 nodes, each
containing two 6-core Intel Xeon X5650 CPUs, an NVIDIA
Tesla C2075 GPU and 72 GB RAM, resulting in a system
containing 1152 cores and 96 GPUs.
The UNCOVER Searching the Deep Earth: A vision for
exploration geoscience in Australia document was
officially launched by the Minister for Resources,
Energy and Tourism, Martin Ferguson, at the 34th
International Geological Congress in Brisbane last
week. This important policy document is a call for
Australian earth scientists to cooperate in an
innovative, structured and nationally coordinated
strategic venture that will bring competitive
advantage to Australian mineral exploration. The
vision requires research groups, surveys and explorers
to participate in a cross-institutional joint research
venture on a scale never before attempted. Dietmar
Muller from the earthByte group is a member of the
UNCOVER implementation committee. See http://www.science.org.au/policy/uncover.html/
for more information.
EarthByte would like to welcome Ashish Agarwal who has
just started an AISRF funded PhD with Dietmar Muller
on Indian ocean plate reconstructions.
EarthByte would like to welcome Judith Sippel (GFZ
Postdam), Kenni Petersen (Aarhus University), Nicolas
Coltice (University Lyon 1), Nick Mortimer (GNS),
Bruce Eglington (University of Saskatchewan) who will
be visiting the EarthByte group in the weeks after the
IGC meeting in Brisbane.
Maria Seton, Dietmar Muller, Jo Whittaker and Jonathan
Aitchinson attended the first Back-arc Basin and
Island Arc Interridge working group meeting in
Brisbane.
Over 15 members of EarthByte attended the
International Geological Congress meeting in Brisbane
and were heavily involved in the organisation of
symposia and sessions.
July 2012
EarthByte would like to
welcome Paul Wessel from the University of Hawaii who
is visiting for several weeks to work on a project on
African absolute plate motions.
Paper published in Earth-Science Reviews: M. Seton,
R.D. Müller, S. Zahirovic, C. Gaina, T.H.
Torsvik, G. Shephard, A. Talsma, M. Gurnis, M. Turner,
S. Maus, M. Chandler, Global continental and ocean
basin reconstructions since 200 Ma, Earth-Science
Reviews, Volume 113, Issues 3-4, July 2012, Pages
212-270, ISSN 0012-8252,
10.1016/j.earscirev.2012.03.002. Download
Paper
June 2012
EarthByte would like to
welcome Sarah Maher from the University of Hawaii who
will be working with Dietmar Muller and Maria Seton on
African absolute plate motions. May 2012
6 May 2012
Paper published in EPSL: Chandler, M., Wessel, P.,
Seton, M., Taylor, B., Hyeong, K., Kim, S., 2012,
Reconstructing Ontong Java Nui: Implications for
Pacific absolute plate motion, hotspot drift and true
polar wander, EPSL, 331, 140-151
A joint University of Sydney-National Taiwan
University will be held at the University of Sydney
between 7-8 June, 2012. The workshop will focus on
plate reconstructions of SE Asia, Tethys and western
North Pacific, mapping and reconstructing slabs, and
ideas and applications for GPlates.
EarthByte is pleased to welcome Laura Alisic from
Caltech for a short research visit. Laura will be
working primarily with Kara Matthews on plate
reorganisations
Kara Matthews joins the Einstein A Go Go RRR Fm radio
program to discuss plate tectonics 100,000,000 years
ago. http://rrrfm.libsyn.com/einstein-a-go-go-6-may-2012
April 2012
Paper published in
G-Cubed: Zahirovic, S., Müller, R. D., Seton,
M., Flament, N., Gurnis, M. and Whittaker, J., 2012,
Insights on the kinematics of the India-Eurasia
collision from global geodynamic models, G3, VOL.
13, Q04W11, 25 PP., 2012 doi:10.1029/2011GC003883
Congratulations to Ana Gibbons for submitting her
PhD thesis. Well done Ana!
Dietmar Muller, Nicolas Flament, Christian Heine,
Logan Yeo and Maria Seton will be attending the EGU
meeting in Vienna
March 2012
Congratulations to Grace
Shephard for being selected to participate in the
62nd Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, which is
dedicated to Physics this year. Only the 550 most
qualified Young Researchers can be given the
opportunity to enrich and share the unique
atmosphere of the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings. Congratulations Grace!
For more information, please visit their website.
February 2012
Paper published in Paleocenography: Herold, N.,
Huber, M., Müller, R.D and Seton, M., 2012,
Modelling the Miocene climatic optimum, Part 2:
ocean circulation, Paleoceanography,
doi:10.1029/2010PA002041
EarthByte is pleased to welcome Sascha Brune from
GFZ Potsdam for a 2 week research visit
Congratulations to Kara
Matthews who has been awarded the prestigious Chris
Powell Medal of the Geological Society of Australia
at a meeting of the Specialist Group in Tectonics
& Structural Geology in Waratah Bay, Victoria.
Well done! Download
Paper
January 2012
A new Interridge working group on "Drivers of the
Episodic life-cycle of Intra-oceanic Arc-Backarc
Hydrothermal Systems" chaired by Maria Seton has
been approved by Interridge. Other EarthByte
members involved in the working group are Dietmar
Muller, Jo Whitakker and Joanathan Aitchison.
Further details about Interridge activities can be
found at http://www.interridge.org
An IODP workshop on the SW
Pacific to be hosted ay the University of Sydney has
been approved. The workshop, led by Neville
Exon, Stephen Gallagher and Maria Seton will see ~70
scientists from around the world come to USyd for a
4 day workshop in October, 2012.
Paper published in Computers
and Geosciences: Gurnis, M., Turner, M., Zahirovic,
S., DiCaprio, L., Spasojevich, S., Müller,
R.D., Boyden, J., ., M., Manea, V.C., Bower, D. and
Zahirovich, S., 2012, Plate Reconstructions with
Continuously Closing Plates, Computers and
Geosciences, 38, 35-42,
doi:10.1016/j.cageo.2011.04.014. Download
Paper
December 2011
Maria Seton is attending the Third Decadal Plan
Interridge meeting in San Francisco
EarthByte group members
Dietmar Müller, Adriana Dutkiewicz, Nicolas
Flament, Leonardo Quevedo, Maria Seton, Simon
Williams, Nathaniel Butterworth, Kayla Maloney and
Kara Matthews are attending the AGU Fall Meeting
2011 in San Francisco, USA from 5-9 December, 2011.
Click here for details
November 2011
Paper published in the
Nature Geoscience: K. Hoernle, F. Hauff, R. van den
Bogaard, A. D. Gibbons, S. Conrad and R. D.
Müller, 2011, Origin of Indian Ocean Seamount
Province by shallow recycling of continental
lithosphere, Nature Geoscience, doi:10.1038/ngeo1331
Download
Paper
Ana Gibbons, Dietmar
Müller and colleagues from IfM-GEOMAR Leibniz
Institute of Marine Sciences, Germany research into
Indian Ocean Cocktail Party leaves trail of party
hats behind has been highlighted on the USyd News Download
Paper
Kara Matthew's microplates project is featured and
the GPlates software itself is also highlighted in
the 'Stories of
Australian Science' publication for 2011. Download
Paper
Congratulations to Nicolas
Flament and Patrice Rey for their interesting
Geology paper on subaqueous continental flood
basalts. Download
Paper
Congratulations to the
EarthByte group who has been successful in two
multi-Chief Investigator Linkage Infrastructure,
Equipment and Facilities grant submissions. Well
done!
EarthByte research into the
tilting of the Australian continent toward the
northeast over the past 50 million years has been
featured in the ‘Nature Geoscience’ research
highlights section. Download
Paper
October 2011
Congratulations to Maria Seton and her team who have
been successful in a bid for ~$1M in ship time on
the Southern Surveyor, the Australian Marine
National Facility. Maria and her team will
investigate the ‘Tectonic framework for the
easternmost Coral Sea and northern extent of the
Lord Howe hotspot’ during a ~3-week long cruise in
October/November 2012. Well done!
September 2011
Paper published in Lithosphere: DiCaprio, L. Gurnis, M.,
Müller, R.D., and Tan, E., 2011, Mantle
dynamics of continent-wide Cenzoic subsidence and
tilting of Australia, Lithosphere, doi:
10.1130/L140.1. Download
Paper 
The EarthByte Group would like
to welcome PhD student Florian Wobbe who is visiting
our research group for 2 months from AWI
Bremerhaven, Germany working on circum-Antarctic
palaeo-bathymetry reconstructions
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
EarthByte PhD students Aedon
Talsma, Logan Yeo and Grace Shephard are attending
the Geological Society's Dynamic Topography
conference in London.
Congratulations to Luke Mondy
who finished his Honours Thesis! Well done!
August 2011
Leonardo Quevedo is attending
the 12th International Workshop on Modeling of
Mantle Convection and Lithospheric Dynamics in
Germany from 20-25 August. Click here
for details
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 for deforming plate models and geodynamic
modelling. The RISE scholarship is an initiative of
the German government-funded DAAD to facilitate
international academic exchange and promote research
careers with undergraduate students in Germany. It
covers travel cost, insurance and pays a salary for
the successful students.
Congratulations to the
geodynamic modelling team for their successful
application for computing resources from the Pawsy
Centre (iVEC) at Perth as well as a successful
follow-up NCI resource allocation.
PhD student Kara Matthews is
on a 3 week research visit to Caltech to work with
Prof. Mike Gurnis and his group on a project related
to the 100 Ma plate reorganisation
EarthByte is pleased to
welcome Matthew Huber from Purdue University for a
half day visit during his super-short stay in
Sydney.
Simon Williams, Christian
Heine, Leonardo Quevedo and Dietmar Müller were
successful in a University of Sydney STEPs teaching
enhancement program funding starting next year which
will go towards the development of field-based
geophysical data acquisition practicals for 3rd year
students.
July 2011
PhD student Sabin Zahirovic is
attending the International Congress on the Permian
and Carboniferous in Perth
A News and Views piece by
Dietmar Müller titled "Plate motion and mantle
plumes" has been published in Nature.
EarthByte warmly welcomes new
PhD student Maral Hoseinpour who has started her PhD
on plate deformation models of passive margins.
Great news! Jo Whittaker has
given birth to a healthy baby boy. Daniel Walker was
born on Sunday, 17th July. Congratulations Jo and
Sharik!
Congratulations to PhD student
Logan Yeo and honours student Allison Thomas who
have both been awarded a PESA Tertiary Study Grant.
Well done!
GPlates has been accepted by
Softpedia which is a popular library of over 400,000
free and free-to-try software programs and is one of
the top 500 websites (according to Alexa traffic
rankings). Since GPlates' acceptance yesterday (30th
June) it has already been downloaded over 1,000
times according to Softpedia. This is significant
considering that the total number of downloads from
Sourceforge, the main distribution site for GPlates
over its lifetime, exceeds 10,000. GPlates was
tested by Softpedia and granted the 100% FREE
Softpedia award.
June 2011
EarthByte is pleased to have
Jerome Dyment and Roi Granot from IPG Paris visiting
our research group as part of the Indian Ocean
project.
EarthByte is pleased to have
Prof. Tony Watts from Oxford University visiting our
research group and presenting a seminar on "Plate
Flexure and Dynamic Topography".
Great news! The Pyrites of the
Caribbean won the Sydney Uni Social Lunchtime mixed
soccer comp!!! The semi-final was 6-5 with Pyrites
beating the undefeated team "The Pretenders", and
the final game score was 1-1 and went to golden
goal. Nathan scored the winning goal with one minute
to spare! Woo! Well done to EarthByters Nathan
Butterworth, Leonardo Quevedo, Grace Shephard, Megan
Holt and Kayla Maloney.
May 2011
Congratulations to PhD
students Sabin Zahirovic and Aedon Talsma who both
received the University of Sydney, Faculty of
Science Award for Citizenship for their contribution
to extra-curricular activities at the university.
Well done!
Congratulations to PhD student
Kayla Maloney who has been awarded a University of
Sydney Postgraduate Research Prize for Outstanding
Academic Achievement, based on her paper "Crustal
growth during back-arc closure: Cretaceous
exhumation history of Cordillera Darwin, southern
Patagonia" in J. Metamorphic Petrology (Maloney et
al., 2011). Well done Kayla!
EarthByte's Dietmar
Müller, Joanne Whittaker and Ana Gibbons along
with Gordon Lister and Lloyd White of the Research
School of Earth Sciences at ANU, Canberra, have won
funding for their project "Towards a unified East
Gondwanaland reconstruction and its implications for
Himalayan Orogeny" from the Australia-India
Strategic Research Fund (AISRF). This project will
involve a close collaboration with Yatheesh
Vadakkeyakath, K.A. Kamesh Raju, G.C. Bhattacharya
and S. Kiranmai of the National Institute of
Oceanography in Goa, India. The project follows on
from a successful French-Australian collaboration
that unraveled a new high-resolution plate model of
the Australia-Antarctica-India plate boundaries,
while similar information was obtained for the
India-Antarctica-Africa plate boundaries under two
recently concluded Indo-French collaborations. These
two results will now be synthesized into a unified
model of high-resolution plate reconstructions for
the East Gondwanaland fragments. These synthesized
results will allow testing different continental fit
reconstruction models by using a variety of
reconstructed data sets and different plate circuits
while accommodating various known microcontinents/
continental fragments. The revised reconstruction
models are expected to provide tighter constraints
for India-Eurasia collision and Himalayan Orogeny.
It is hoped the studies will be extended to
understand the genesis of some of the major tectonic
features of the region.
April 2011
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, and plate
boundary interactions, and Nicolas Flament
co-chaired the session "Early Earth: from deep
dynamics to surface life"
Click for more info on the EGU General
Assembly
March 2011
Patrice attended an Auscope
meeting to present the view of Structural Geologists
and Tectonicists on Underworld.
February 2011
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. In line with the new IODP science plan,
the proposed workshop would broadly cover the
following four themes: 1. Cenozoic oceanography,
climate change, gateways and reef development. 2.
The history of the monsoons. 3. Tectonics and
volcanism. 4. The deep biosphere. Because there has
been no drilling in the Indian Ocean for nearly a
decade, this workshop is seen as vital in building
the international scientific alliances that can lead
to further strong proposals. EarthByte has many
ongoing projects focused on Indian Ocean research,
including a French-Australian Science and Technology
(FAST) project on Indian Ocean tectonics (Dietmar
Müller, Jerome Dyment (IPG Paris), Jo
Whittaker, Ana Gibbons), an upcoming research cruise
on the Southern Surveyor to the Perth Abyssal Plain
(Jo Whittaker, Simon Williams, Dietmar
Müller,), a Statoil-funded industry project
focused on the early evolution of the Indian Ocean
(Dietmar Müller, Jo Whittaker, Ana Gibbons),
and several other projects (ARC Discovery and
Linkage) with global themes, but including strong
Indian Ocean components, e.g. focused on continental
margins surrounding the Indian Ocean, such as
Australia's Northwest Shelf (Christian Heine, Aedon
Talsma), the evolution and closure of the Tethys
ocean, and India-Eurasia collision (Maria Seton,
Sabin Zahirovic, Nicolas Flament, Dietmar
Müller) and the evolution of the topography and
segmentation of the Indian Ocean floor (Kara
Matthews, Dietmar Müller, Jo Whittaker and Paul
Wessel (Hawaii).
We welcome a new PhD student
Logan Yeo who will be working with Dietmar and
Christian!
January 2011
Patrice joined the editorial
board of Lithosphere, a new journal published by the
Geological Society of America.
This month saw the release of
the proceedings of the 2010 Theo Murphy High Flyers
Think Tank, which was held at the Australian Academy
of Sciences in August 2010 and brought together the
nation's top geoscience researchers, including
EarthByte's Prof. Dietmar Müller and Dr Thomas
Landgrebe, to address challenges in mineral
exploration. Dietmar and Thomas chaired a breakout
group discussion on 'Computational, information
management and modelling advances' and Dietmar
presented a talk on 'Knowledge discovery via a
virtual geological observatory'.
Click for full article.
Click for the complete Think Tank Proceedings.
GPlates 1.0 has been released!
Click to download
GPlates 1.0
EarthByte
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