Researchers measured the height of the seafloor in back-arc basins around the world after correcting for sediment, crustal structure and plate age, to work out how much of that height is due to deeper mantle processes. They found that most of these basins sit lower than expected, and this effect gets stronger where the subducting … Read more…
Happy Earth Science Week from the EarthByters! This is our annual chance to celebrate the science of the planet we all live on, and to share how much there is still to discover about it. The ground under your feet is moving. Right now, at about the speed your fingernails grow, and it has been … Read more…
Congratulations to Adriana Dutkiewicz, who has been awarded the Lee Allison Award for Outstanding Contributions to Geoinformatics and Data Science by the Geological Society of America Geoinformatics and Data Science Division. This annual award recognises distinguished contributions to the geosciences through the application and promotion of geoinformatics. Adriana’s work has helped transform how large, complex … Read more…
Researchers reconstructed global continental elevation over the past 4 billion years by combining a huge dataset of igneous rock chemistry with machine-learning estimates of crustal thickness and isostatic modelling. They found that continents stayed mostly submerged through much of the Archean, then began repeatedly building Tibetan-scale “super highlands” from about 2.1 billion years ago onward, … Read more…
Researchers used forward stratigraphic modelling to reconstruct how Scott Reef, on Australia's Northwest Shelf, grew and changed shape during the Middle Pleistocene Transition, a period when ice age cycles became longer and more extreme. They found that a major sea-level fall around 1.2 million years ago exposed and karstified the reef, while a later long … Read more…
Researchers used an open-source landscape and stratigraphic evolution model (goSPL) to simulate how sediment filled the Polish Trough, part of the Southern Permian Basin, between 285 and 256 million years ago. By testing six different tectonic and climate scenarios, they identified two models that best match known sediment volumes, hiatus timing and depositional depth, and … Read more…
Using three-dimensional numerical models, the authors investigate how a buoyant ribbon of thickened oceanic crust colliding with a subduction zone disturbs stress and strain within the subducting slab and the surrounding plates. They find that the angle of collision creates compartmentalised zones of high and low strain rate around a region of strong vorticity, and … Read more…
This study compares sandy beaches within estuaries and bays in a microtidal system (Pittwater, Sydney) and a mesotidal system (Ría de Vigo, Spain) to understand how waves, tides and sediment shape beach profiles. Swell waves dominate wave energy in both settings, but their relative contribution decreases further from the estuary entrance, where wind and infragravity … Read more…
Researchers developed a machine learning framework to predict where copper–gold porphyry deposits are likely to occur in the Lachlan Fold Belt of New South Wales, Australia. By combining geological, geophysical and remote sensing data with a positive-unlabelled bagging and random forest approach, the model successfully captures 95% of known mineral occurrences within just 5% of … Read more…
Researchers collected new apatite fission-track and (U-Th)/He data across more than 5000 km of the East Antarctic margin to reconstruct its rifting history. The results show that an earlier, failed rifting episode in the Permo-Triassic period cooled and shaped the crust more strongly than the later Jurassic-Cretaceous breakup of Gondwana itself. This multi-phase rifting appears … Read more…
Scientists measured how well iron-bearing bridgmanite, the main mineral in Earth’s lower mantle, conducts electricity under high pressure and temperature conditions. They found conductivity rises sharply with iron content but barely changes with temperature, allowing iron variations to be mapped directly from global conductivity models derived from geomagnetic data. The results suggest iron-rich material within … Read more…
This study used forward stratigraphic modelling of the Hunter offshore margin in New South Wales to examine how Cenozoic sea-level changes shaped the layering of sediments on passive continental margins. The results show that warm 'greenhouse' periods produced thick, continuous sediment layers good for storing gases, while colder 'icehouse' periods produced thinner, stacked layers that … Read more…
Scientists studied granitoids from the Kangding area in the southeastern Tibetan Plateau, using new elemental and isotopic data, including the first silicon isotope measurements for these rocks, to trace how the plateau’s crust grew eastward over the last 35 million years. The granites fall into two groups, and one of them shows a temporary shift … Read more…
Scientists drilling into the Tyrrhenian Sea seafloor as part of the International Ocean Discovery Program recovered rock cores showing granite intrusions mixed with peridotite along an ancient detachment fault. Dating and chemical analysis show the granites formed about 4 million years ago some 7 to 9 kilometres down, then were rapidly brought to the seafloor … Read more…
Modern reef-building corals only thrive within a narrow sea surface temperature range of about 22–30°C. The authors use this preference as an independent check on past climate models, running an ensemble of simulations from 250 million years ago to today across a range of CO2 levels and paleogeographies. Their coral-constrained temperature curve closely matches earlier … Read more…
The Viru Microplate study uses high-resolution satellite gravity data together with new shipboard bathymetry to reveal a previously unknown episode of chaotic seafloor spreading between 44 and 28 million years ago at the Pacific-Farallon plate boundary. This episode produced a newly identified microplate, named the Viru Microplate, along with ridge jumps and propagating spreading ridges. … Read more…
This paper outlines the experimental design for Phase 2 of DeepMIP-Eocene, a project that coordinates climate model simulations of the early Eocene, a period around 56–41 million years ago when global temperatures were far higher than today and carbon dioxide levels were much greater. The design updates the paleogeography, vegetation and carbon dioxide inputs used … Read more…
Researchers used magnetotelluric surveys to image the electrical structure of the crust around the world-class Broken Hill Pb-Zn-Ag deposit in NSW, Australia. They found that the upper crust here is mostly resistive, with only small, isolated conductive zones linked to the ore body and its host rocks, which do not connect down to a deeper … Read more…
Researchers analysed the age and chemistry of lavas from the base of the western Aleutian volcanic arc, sampled across roughly 700 kilometres, to work out when subduction began there. The results show that Aleutian subduction started at least 56 million years ago, with early lavas resembling those formed during the onset of subduction in the … Read more…
This study explores why sediment-hosted mineral deposits tend to form near the edges of ancient continental cores, or cratons. By combining a 1.8-billion-year plate motion model with seismic imaging of craton edges, geodynamic modelling and a global mineral deposit database, the authors show that mineralised craton edges typically formed 800-1800 km from active subduction zones, … Read more…
Researchers modelled global mantle flow over the past 1.8 billion years, incorporating the gradual cooling of Earth’s core and the decay of radiogenic heat sources through time. They found that this long-term cooling reduces both the heat flowing out of the core and the temperature of mantle plumes, at rates consistent with independent geological evidence. … Read more…
EarthByte has released version 1.0 of an open-source tutorial suite, “Extending PyGMT into Deep Time via GPlately“, which combines GPlately’s plate-tectonic reconstructions with PyGMT’s publication-quality cartography. The AuScope-supported suite includes 80 Jupyter notebooks organised into 11 thematic learning clusters, with workflows ranging from a first paleogeographic map for undergraduates to research-grade applications. Topics covered include … Read more…
Congratulations to Associate Professor Maria Seton from the School of Geosciences. Her research on the origins of two underwater volcano chains in the Tasman Sea is featured in The Conversation. In the article, published on 18 September 2026, Associate Professor Seton and co-author Dr Ben Mather (ARC Early Career Industry Fellow, University of Melbourne) explain … Read more…
Congratulations to Associate Professor Adriana Dutkiewicz, who has been elected a Fellow of the Geological Society of America (GSA). This prestigious honour recognises her sustained record of contributions to the geosciences and to the Geological Society of America. She has authored/co-authored 14 research articles in Geology, a level of sustained contribution to the journal that … Read more…
Congratulations to A/Prof Maria Seton, who has been awarded the S.W. Carey Medal from the Geological Society of Australia for her outstanding contribution and impact in the field of tectonics. The award was announced at the Australian Earth Sciences Convention in Melbourne, as part of the Geological Society of Australia’s 2026 national awards. A/Prof Seton … Read more…
Using a 3D numerical model of mantle convection, the authors show how a single deep mantle plume can be split into two long-lived branches by a stagnating slab in the upper mantle, producing parallel volcanic chains. This explains why the Lord Howe and Tasmantid seamount chains in the SW Pacific have stayed 650–900 km apart … Read more…
This Perspective argues that as artificial intelligence is increasingly built into Earth system models, reproducibility needs to be rethought to match how these hybrid models actually work. The authors highlight risks such as numerical instability, opaque procedures and unequal access to computing power, which can undermine trust and traceability in climate research. They propose a … Read more…
Researchers compared fission track counts made by a trained AI system (HALtracks 2D) with those of an expert human analyst using identical microscope images of apatite and mica samples. The AI matched human counts closely on clean, simple grains and performed comparably to the average expert even on more complex samples, though both struggled with … Read more…
Coral reefs need enough living coral cover to support habitats, build carbonate structures and buffer waves, but it has been unclear exactly when reefs shift between healthy and degraded states, especially since different reefs have different baseline coral cover. This study tracked benthic cover from 1995 to 2022 at three Great Barrier Reef sites, indexing … Read more…
🚀 pyBacktrack 1.5 is now released! The new release makes pyBacktrack easier to install and expands its capabilities for backtracking, backstripping, paleobathymetry reconstruction, dynamic topography, sea-level modelling, and drill-site reconstructions. Users can now install pyBacktrack using: pip install pybacktrack conda install pybacktrack docker pull earthbyte/pybacktrack What’s new in pyBacktrack 1.5? The release adds conda installation … Read more…