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
December 2011
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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