News

Here are all the latest EarthByte news posts. See News Archive for recent years.

EarthByte also publishes the ‘GPlates News‘ newsletter every quarter. The GPlates newsletter contains features such as the latest GPlates updates, tutorials and datasets, EarthByte news highlights and much more! Click here to view the latest and past editions of ‘GPlates News‘, or subscribe to receive the newsletters.

EarthByters find that death of ancient ocean between China and Russia triggered mantle upwelling

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Flament_Figure5A collaboration between the University of Wollongong, the EarthByte Group at the University of Sydney, the California Institute of Technology and ETH Zürich have solved the mystery of the formation of a recently discovered structure 2,500 km below the city of Perm in Russia.

Earth’s lowermost rocky mantle, just above its iron-rich core, is characterised by two giant hot upwellings under the Pacific Ocean and Africa. Many islands in the Pacific and around Africa owe their volcanic activity to “hotspots” within these large, hot regions deep underneath the surface.  … Read more…

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Augury Geodynamics team visits Earthbyte Group in December 2016 in the quest towards Plate Tectonics 2.0

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Augury-EarthByte cutout.jpgOur geodynamics collaborators from the Augury Geodynamics Group, Univ. Lyon, are spending the month of December 2016 with the EarthByte Group  to collaborate on a range of issues revolving around seeking improved connections between kinematic (plate tectonic) and dynamic Earth models to advance our understanding and knowledge of the evolution of the solid Earth and the “rules of plate tectonics”. Even though some basic rules of plate tectonics have been accepted since the 70s, these rules are not extensive enough to understand the dynamic, time-dependent interaction between the convecting mantle and the tectonic plates.  The visit is inspired by the move towards Plate Tectonics 2.0 – the development of a unified conceptual and methodological framework to understand how the shallow crust, landscapes, continental margins, and ocean basins interact with the coupled non-linear evolution of the plates and deep Earth through time.

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EarthByte Group develops machine learning recipe to find copper-gold deposits along the Andes

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In a paper just published in the journal Tectonics, EarthByter and Natural Sciences, University of Sydney alumnus Nathaniel Butterworth and colleagues from the School of Geosciences, University of Sydney and Data61/CSIRO have developed a spatio-temporal machine learning recipe to identify subduction zone tectonic environments in which porphyry copper-gold deposits tend to form. The new approach could pave the way for future mineral discoveries.

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GPlates 2.0 Released

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2016_11_MedMeet-Group.jpgGPlates 2.0 was released last week, with lots of new features including plate deformation, volume rendering, much improved project and session management, a plate topology building tool and an interactive tool to determine best-fit rotation poles using the method of Hellinger, and much more. Check out the full list of improvements here. … Read more…

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NW Shelf Basin Hub workshop at Curtin University

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NW_Shelf_Workshop_CurtinA number of Basin Hub members have gathered at Curtin University in Perth to brainstorm and discuss progress on research relating to the tectonic and surface process evolution of the NW Australian shelf. Our PhD student Amy I’Anson sends these photos of the team using Curtin’s spectacular HIVE 24 megapixel screen. Very cool! … Read more…

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Dietmar Müller awarded Vice–Chancellor’s Award for Outstanding Research

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StaffAwards2016_MichaelSpence_RDM.jpgDietmar Müller was awarded one of four 2016 Vice–Chancellor’s Award for Outstanding Research at the University of Sydney’s first annual award ceremony on the 25th of October. The award reflects many years of inspired, highly productive team work by the entire EarthByte Group, without whom this would not have been possible. It’s really an award for all EarthByters!  … Read more…

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GPlates 2.0 software and data sets

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GPlates 1.5 PromoGPlates is a free desktop software for the interactive visualisation of plate-tectonics. The compilation and documentation of GPlates 2.0 data was primarily funded by AuScope National Collaborative Research Infrastructure (NCRIS).

GPlates is developed by an international team of scientists and professional software developers at the EarthByte Project (part of AuScope) at the University of Sydney, the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences (GPS) at CalTech, the Geodynamics team at the Geological Survey of Norway (NGU) and the Centre for Earth Evolution and Dynamics (CEED) at the University of Oslo.  … Read more…

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Surface Processes Modelling Workshop

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Badlands imageThe EarthByte Group will conduct a 2 days workshop on surface processes modelling on the 13th and 14th of October in the Madsen Building at the School of Geoscience, The University of Sydney, Australia.

The workshop aims to introduce those interested in landscape evolution and source to sink problems to a new open-source code: Badlands. Note that you do not have to be a seasoned modeller to participate. Geomorphologists, tectonicists and sedimentologists interested in testing conceptual models based on field observations are welcome! … Read more…

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Deep Carbon Modelling Workshop

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Date:  August 29 – 30 2016 Venue: The University of Sydney Description: A two-day workshop bringing together climate and geo-scientists from around Sydney and international collaborators on the DCO-funded Deep Carbon Modelling project. Deep carbon science describes the multi-disciplinary effort to unravel the dynamic interactions of carbon-bearing systems in deep time. The workshop will focus on exploring the interplays … Read more…

Taking the pulse of the global ocean

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sediments_currents_global_oceanWhen organic particles sink from the surface ocean to the seafloor, a small but significant proportion of atmospheric carbon is stored away. Adriana Dutkiewicz and colleagues at the University of Sydney and Data61/CSIRO have now used global data sets collected over decades combined with cutting-edge big data analysis to understand how this process depends on surface ocean environments.   … Read more…

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Commotion in the deep Southern Ocean

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souther_ocean_circulationCongratulations Adriana Dutkiewicz, Dietmar Müller, Andrew Hogg, and Paul Spence for their recent paper published in Geology. Their paper, Vigorous deep-sea currents cause global anomaly in sediment accumulation in the Southern Ocean, revealed an enormous stretch of the Southern Ocean where sediments are building up at a rate that dwarfs other deep ocean locations. The work has attracted the attention of media internationally. … Read more…

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Commotion in the deep Southern Ocean

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SE_Ind_ridge_labelled
Bathymetry of the Southeast indian Ridge, where a major sediment accumulation rate anomaly has been linked to lateral changes in the vigour of bottom water flow.

A team led by the University of Sydney School of Geosciences has found an 8,000-km long sediment pile-up in the middle of the Southern Ocean, making this feature unique in the world. Their study was published today in the leading international journal Geology. … Read more…

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The pains and strains of a continental breakup in the media

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West_Australian_margin.jpg
View of Australia’s western continental margin, looking eastwards from the Indian Ocean.

Congratulations to Dr Sascha Brune, Dr Simon Williams, Dr Nathan Butterworth, and Prof Dietmar Müller on their paper published in Nature earlier this week. The paper,  Abrupt plate accelerations shape rifted continental margins, has been picked up by the media across the globe.

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The pains and strains of a continental breakup

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Every now and then in Earth’s history, a pair of continents draws close enough to form one. There comes a time, however, when they must inevitably part ways. Now scientists at Australia’s EarthByte research group, in collaboration with the German Research Centre for Geosciences, have revealed the underlying mechanics of a continental breakup when this … Read more…

Dietmar Müller finalist for AuScope Excellence in Research Award

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Recently the Australian geoscience community celebrated a decade of AuScope achievements. EarthByte’s very own Prof Dietmar Muller was an award finalist for excellence in scientific research and providing tools (such as GPlates) that enable scientific development in our community. GPlates is an open-source and cross-platform tool that is accessible to high school teachers, research scientists and anyone … Read more…

Research voyage onboard the RV Investigator

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RV_InvestigatorBon voyage! Today, a group of scientists, headed by Dr. Simon Williams from the School of Geosciences, have boarded Australia’s state-of-the-art marine research vessel, the , for a 14-day voyage. The voyage departed from Lautoka, Fiji and is currently headed towards the Fairway Ridge, an uplifted but submerged part of the Lord Howe Rise, northwest of New Caledonia. … Read more…

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Solving Earth’s giant jigsaw puzzle of tectonic plates

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plate-tesselation
Earth’s plate tesselation through time (150 Myr ago to present)

Plate tectonics drives earthquakes and volcanism, forms precious mineral deposits and controls the planet’s long-term carbon cycle.   But why do we have just a few large plates, and many tiny plates?  Does it matter? These questions have now been answered in a French-Swiss-Australian collaborative paper led by PhD student Claire Mallard at the Univ. Lyon, published on 15 June 2016 in the journal Nature. The paper includes Nicolas Coltice (Lyon), EarthByters Dietmar Müller and Maria Seton, and Paul Tackley (ETH). 

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How the Hawaiian-Emperor seamount chain got its spectacular bend

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In a paper published in Nature, Rakib Hassan with fellow EarthByters Dietmar Müller, Simon E. Williams & Nicolas Flament, and Caltech’s Michael Gurnis, proposed a solution to a long standing geological mystery – how the distinct bend in the Hawaiian-Emperor Seamount Chain came to be. Using NCI’s Raijin supercomputer, the research team simulated flow patterns in the Earth’s mantle over the past 100 million years. The convection model suggests that the history of subduction has a profound effect on the time-dependent deformation of the edges of the Large Low-Shear Velocity Province (LLSVP) under the Pacific. The Hawaiian plume originates from the edge of this province and the southward migration of the plume during the formation of the Emperor chain reflects the migration of the northern edge of the LLSVP before ~47 million years ago. 
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