Here are all the latest EarthByte news posts. See News Archive for recent years.
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We are excited to invite you to the next seminar of the 2025 Geology and Geophysics Seminar Series, featuring Ioan Sanislav, who is an A/Prof of Economic Geology and the head of the Economic Geology Research Centre (EGRU) at James Cook University. Ioan will be presenting on “Archean gold mineralization in Tanzania – linking tectonics, magmatism and ore … Read more…
The Hawaiian–Emperor Bend (HEB) has long been a geological Rosetta Stone for probing the link between plate tectonics and mantle dynamics. In a compelling new study in PNAS, Zhang and Hu (2025) revisit this classic problem with global mantle convection models constrained by plate reconstructions. They reveal that in addition to the widely accepted southward … Read more…
We are excited to invite you to the 17th seminar of the 2025 Geology and Geophysics Seminar Series, featuring Fabrizio Magrini, who is a Research Fellow/Lecturer at RSES, Australian National University. Fabrizio will be presenting on “Bayesian Inference with Transport Maps“. In this engaging talk, he will show how advances in computational statistics and optimal transport improve MCMC … Read more…
Craton margins play a crucial role in mineral exploration as they host faults, fractures, and shear zones that facilitate hydrothermal fluid movement, transporting and depositing dissolved metals into valuable mineral deposits. We use the high-resolution full-waveform seismic inversion model REVEAL to extract horizontal shear wave velocity (VSH), vertical shear wave velocity (VSV), and isotropic P-wave … Read more…
We are excited to invite you to the 2025 GRG (Geocoastal Research Group) and Geology-Geophysics seminar, featuring Prof. Laura Wallace, who is a geophysicist and a professor at GEOMAR and the ANZIC’s first female Co-Chief Scientist of IODP. Laura will be presenting on “Unlocking the secrets of slow slip events with IODP drilling“. In this engaging talk, … Read more…
We are excited to invite you to the 16th seminar of the 2025 Geology and Geophysics Seminar Series, featuring Lu Li, who is a geophysicist and research scientist in CSIRO Mineral Resources. Lu will be presenting on “From sea-level to mineral systems, why do we care about lithosphere and how do we understand it with multiphysics?” In this … Read more…
We are excited to invite you to the 15th seminar of the 2025 Geology and Geophysics Seminar Series, featuring Prof. Sascha Brune, who leads the Geodynamic Modelling Section at GFZ and holds a professorship at the University of Potsdam. Sascha will be presenting on “Process Interactions at Plate Boundaries: Rifts, Mountains, Resources“. In this engaging talk, he will … Read more…
We are excited to invite you to the 14th seminar of the 2025 Geology and Geophysics Seminar Series, featuring Nick Mortimer, a petrologist who has spent most of his career with GNS Science. Nick will be presenting on “Metamorphic core complexes, from Nevada to New Zealand“. In this engaging talk, he will present on the evolution of metamorphic … Read more…
We are excited to announce the release of GPlately 2.0.0, a major update that brings significant improvements and new features, offering a significantly better programming experience and marking a major step forward in the evolution of the platform. This release introduces a completely redesigned online documentation, providing users with a much more intuitive and enjoyable reading experience. … Read more…
We are excited to invite you to the 13th seminar of the 2025 Geology and Geophysics Seminar Series, featuring Maria (Coti) Manassero, a post-doctoral research fellow in Geophysics, School of Natural Sciences (Physics), University of Tasmania. Coti will be presenting on “Thickness and ice loss potential of Denman Glacier, East Antarctica: Insight from magnetotelluric data and interdisciplinary studies“. … Read more…
We are excited to invite you to the 12th seminar of the 2025 Geology and Geophysics Seminar Series. This session will feature two engaging talks. Our first speaker is Hamish Brown, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Research School of Earth Sciences, Australian National University. Hamish will be presenting on “Constraining mantle viscosity using dynamic … Read more…
EarthByte Group PhD candidates Elnaz Heidari and Hojat Shirmard have recently been awarded two competitive scholarships: the Australian Society of Exploration Geophysicists (ASEG) Research Foundation Scholarship (2025–2027) and the Edgeworth David Travelling Scholarship, in recognition of their innovative geoscience research. In addition to these honours, Hojat has also been selected to receive the Faculty of … Read more…
The opening of the Equatorial Atlantic Ocean constitutes the final stage of Gondwana’s breakup, leading to the separation of the African and South American continents. The early spreading has been debated due to the absence of magnetic anomalies related to the Early Cretaceous opening at low latitude, and an incomplete fracture zone record, hidden by … Read more…
Deep-sea carbonates constitute the primary deep carbon reservoir, playing a critical role in regulating the long-term global carbon cycle. Reconstructing the temporal evolution of carbonate flux to the seafloor requires estimating the changes in carbonate compensation depth (CCD), a key proxy, revealing the depth where the rate of calcium carbonate supply from biogenic ooze equals … Read more…
Oceanic seafloor is scarred by age discontinuities, seamounts, and large igneous provinces (LIPs) over normal bathymetry. The recycling of these seafloor anomalies has been speculated to alter subduction regimes which may locally prime some regions for porphyry copper deposit formation. Using a tectonic plate reconstruction encompassing the last 100 Ma paired with a machine learning classifier … Read more…
The fossil record shows a prominent 60 million-year biodiversity cycle during the Phanerozoic Eon, the origin of which is still unknown. Here we use time-series analysis and correlation of empirical and model datasets of Earth’s interior and sur cial processes to demonstrate that this cycle is a pervasive feature in marine animal genus-level diversity data … Read more…
Traditional geological mapping methods, which rely on field observations and rock sample analysis, are inefficient for continuous spatial mapping of geological features such as alteration zones. Deep learning models such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have ushered in a transformative era in remote sensing data analysis. CNNs excel in automatically extracting features from image data … Read more…
We are excited to invite you to the 11th seminar of the 2025 Geology and Geophysics Seminar Series, featuring Patrice Rey, a Professor of Structural Geology, Tectonics and Geodynamics in the School of Geosciences, University of Sydney. Patrice will be presenting on “A Thermo-Mechanical Framework for Proterozoic Basins“. This interesting talk will delve into how elevated thermal conditions … Read more…
We are excited to invite you to the 10th seminar of the 2025 Geology and Geophysics Seminar Series, featuring Maxwell Lechte, a Research Fellow who works on Precambrian geobiology and sedimentary geology at the School of Geography Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Melbourne. Max will be presenting on “Using the sedimentary iron record to track environmental change … Read more…
Supervised machine learning methods for geological mapping via remote sensing face limitations due to the scarcity of accurately labelled training data that can be addressed by unsupervised learning, such as dimensionality reduction and clustering. Dimensionality reduction methods have the potential to play a crucial role in improving the accuracy of geological maps. Although conventional dimensionality … Read more…
Magnetic observations from the oceans have made fundamental contributions to our knowledge of plate motions and the evolution of the geomagnetic field over the past ∼200 Myr. Here we construct updated models of magnetization for the oceanic lithosphere, taking advantage of the most recent models for Earth’s past plate motions. We then evaluate these models using … Read more…
Quantitative analysis of crustal thickness evolution across deep time poses critical insights into the planet’s geological history. It may help uncover new areas with potential critical mineral deposits and reveal the impacts of crustal thickness and elevation changes on the development of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere. However, most existing estimation methods are restricted to … Read more…
We are excited to invite you to the 9th seminar of the 2025 Geology and Geophysics Seminar Series, featuring Samuel Boone, a Lecturer in Geology in the School of Geosciences, University of Sydney. Sam will be presenting on “OUT OF A CRUCIBLE OF STONE: How 800 million years of tectonism forged the Cradle of Humanity“. This interesting talk … Read more…
We are excited to invite you to the 8th seminar of the 2025 Geology and Geophysics Seminar Series, featuring Sinan Özaydın, a post-doctoral research fellow in School of Geosciences, University of Sydney. Sinan will be presenting on “Using thermomechanical modelling to decode anomalies from magnetotelluric models: an example from a pull-apart basin.” presenting a new approach that transforms … Read more…
We are excited to invite you to the 7th seminar of the 2025 Geology and Geophysics Seminar Series, featuring Josephine Joergensen, a visiting PhD student in the EarthByte group at University of Sydney, visiting from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego. Josephine will be presenting on “Analysing small-scale seafloor topography“, discussing the significance of … Read more…
We’re pleased to announce the release of pyGPlates 1.0. PyGPlates enables access to GPlates functionality via the Python programming language. PyGPlates can now be installed using conda or pip. Please see the installation instructions in the pyGPlates documentation. Note: The old method of manually installing pre-compiled binaries is no longer supported (that’s now handled by conda and pip). But … Read more…
We are excited to invite you to the next seminar of the 2025 Geology and Geophysics Seminar Series, featuring Dr. Thomas Mauch, a Research Compute Data Scientist and NCI-Sydney Scheme Manager at Sydney Informatics Hub, University of Sydney. Tom will be presenting on “Sydney Research Cloud: Changes to Research Computing” discussing the transition from Artemis to NCI and … Read more…
Abstract. The discovery of new economic copper deposits is critical for the development of renewable energy infrastructure and zero-emissions transport. The majority of existing copper mines are located within current or extinct continental arc systems, but our understanding of the tectonic and geodynamic conditions favoring the formation of porphyry systems is still incomplete. Traditionally, exploration … Read more…
The Phanerozoic climate has been interrupted by two long “icehouse” intervals, including the current icehouse of the last ~34 million years. While these cool intervals correspond to lower atmospheric CO2, it is unclear why CO2 levels fell, with hypotheses suggesting changes in CO2 degassing rates or modification of silicate weathering through changing continental lithology or paleogeography. Here, … Read more…
We are excited to invite you to the next seminar of the 2025 Geology and Geophysics Seminar Series, featuring Valentin Rime, a visiting researcher at the School of Geosciences, University of Sydney. Valentin will be presenting on “Rift, breakup and drift: what can we learn from the Afar Depression, Eastern Africa?” exploring the structure, evolution, and key controls … Read more…