Here are all the latest EarthByte news posts. See News Archive for recent years.
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The migration of Homo erectus in Southeast Asia during Early Pleistocene is cardinal to our comprehension of the evolution of the genus Homo. However, the limited consideration of the rapidly changing physical environment, together with controversial datings of hominin bearing sites, make it challenging to secure the robust timeline needed to unveil the behavior of early humans. Here, … Read more…
Relative sea-level changes can dramatically alter coastal geomorphology and coastlines, which, in turn, can fundamentally alter tidal regimes. The Great Barrier Reef (GBR) has undergone around 120 m of relative sea level (RSL) rise since the Last Glacial Maximum, ∼20,000 years ago (ka). Ooid grains (sand sized carbonate sediment) that formed in shallow water (>5 m depth) … Read more…
With the rapid development of deep learning technologies, data-driven methods have become one of the main research focuses in geophysical inversion. Applications of various neural network architectures to the inversion of seismic, electromagnetic, gravity and other types of data confirm the potential of these methods in real-time parameter estimation without dependence on the starting subsurface … Read more…
The Tibetan Plateau plays a central role in global atmospheric circulation, acts as a key biodiversity hotspot, and delivers fresh water for more than 20% of the global population. Projecting its future uplift and erosion trajectory over geological time can offer potential testable hypotheses into interactions between tectonic and surface processes. Rey, P., Salles, T., … Read more…
The Atlantic is the only ocean basin almost entirely surrounded by passive margins, and a major global long-term sink of carbonate carbon that has evaded subduction. Quantifying the history of carbonate accumulation in the Atlantic has been limited by the absence of well-defined regional carbonate compensation depth (CCD) models. We determine the CCD for the … Read more…
The next EarthByte seminar will be held at 11am–12pm on Wednesday 16th November in Madsen Seminar Room 331 at the University of Sydney. This week we will be hearing from Ben Fulcher from the Dynamics and Neural Systems Group within the School of Physics at the University of Sydney, discussing his work on “Quantifying patterns in time series.” As usual, the seminar will be streamed live over Zoom at the following link: https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/82037433636.
More details are below:
AGU Science News: Billion-Year Rewind Tracks Supercontinents and Mantle Structures – EOS has featured our recent paper on tracing past pathways of tectonic plates and their boundaries back a billion years. The article highlights how our work on solid Earth system evolution is driving “a second plate tectonic revolution”., inspiring future work to test and … Read more…
The next installment of the EarthByte seminar series will be held at 11am–12pm next Wednesday 5th October, featuring Nick Mortimer from GNS Science in New Zealand. The seminar will be held in the Madsen Building Rm 449 at the University of Sydney, and streamed live on Zoom at this link: https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/82037433636.
Further details on the talk are below:
Several theories have been proposed to explain atoll formation. While karst dissolution during glacial periods and preferential coral reef accretion along raised bank margins during deglaciations and interglacials have been invoked to explain atoll formation, the respective roles of karst dissolution and reef margin construction in atoll formation have not been adequately evaluated by simulations. … Read more…
The next EarthByte seminar will be held simultaneously in the Madsen Building Rm 449 at the University of Sydney and online via Zoom, at the following link: https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/82037433636. Further details are below:
Welcome to two new PhD students who have joined the EarthByte Group. Satyam Pratap Singh has joined the Stellar project working on reconstructions of palaeogeography through time and will be jointly supervised by Maria Seton, Sabin Zahirovic and Nicky Wright. Tom New has joined a recently funded ARC Discovery Project on plate-plume interactions and will … Read more…
The Cenozoic landscape evolution in southwestern North America is ascribed to crustal isostasy, dynamic topography, or lithosphere tectonics, but their relative contributions remain controversial. Here we reconstruct landscape history since the late Eocene by investigating the interplay between mantle convection, lithosphere dynamics, climate, and surface pro- cesses using fully coupled four-dimensional numerical models. Our quantified … Read more…
Modern ocean biodiversity, which is at its highest level ever, was achieved through long-term stability of the location of so-called biodiversity hotspots, regions of especially high numbers of species, scientists have found. The findings, published in Nature, were reached through a pioneering model that reconstructs the diversity of marine animals from their origin – some … Read more…
The fossil record of marine invertebrates has long fuelled the debate as to whether or not there are limits to global diversity in the sea. Ecological theory states that, as diversity grows and ecological niches are filled, the strengthening of biological interactions imposes limits on diversity. However, the extent to which biological interactions have constrained … Read more…
Understanding the long-term evolution of Earth’s plate-mantle system is reliant on absolute plate motion models in a mantle reference frame, but such models are both difficult to construct and controversial. We present a tectonic rules-based optimisation approach to construct a plate motion model in a mantle reference frame covering the last billion years and use … Read more…
How can the sluggish, long-wavelength mantle convection be expressed by so many time and space scales of morphotectonic activity? To investigate these relationships, we explore the Java-Banda subduction zone, where geodynamic records cluster. In the far-East Tethys, the exceptionally arcuate Banda subduction zone circumscribes the deepest oceanic basin on Earth, seismotectonic activity slices the upper … Read more…
The lithospheric build-up of the African continent is still to a large extent unexplored. In this contribution, we present a new Moho depth model to discuss the architecture of the three main African cratonic units, which are: West African Craton, Congo Craton, and Kalahari Craton. Our model is based on a two-step gravity inversion approach … Read more…
PyBacktrack 1.4 is now available, and adds support for generating paleobathymetry grids from submerged present-day crust. PyBacktrack is available as a Python package and a Docker image. Installation instructions can be found online in the pyBacktrack documentation. Changes since version 1.3: Can now generate paleobathymetry grids: Submerged oceanic and continental present-day crust is backtracked and … Read more…
Join us at 11am this Wednesday 15th June for the latest installment of the EarthByte seminar series, featuring Sydney Uni’s own Matt Boyd! The seminar will be held over Zoom at the following link: https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/82071832536. For more details, see below:
Earth’s hot and cold climates driven by tectonic plate speeds A new study has revealed how the plate tectonic carbon cycle maintains a “Goldilocks climate” on Earth that is neither too hot nor too cold. It is now established that CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels are driving atmospheric CO2 above 400 parts per million … Read more…
This video shows plate motions, carbon storage within tectonic plates and carbon degassing along mid-ocean ridges and subduction zones through time. Our carbon model shows these processes alone cannot explain global cooling in the Cenozoic Era. The effects of rock erosion, not shown here, played a key role. Arrows indicate plate motion speed relative to … Read more…
The next EarthByte seminar, presented by Macquarie University’s Rosa Didonna, will be held on Wednesday 18th May at 4pm (Sydney time). As usual, the seminar will be hosted via Zoom, at the following link: https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/84109085175. Further details are below:
Postgraduate research scholarship at the EarthByte Group for international and domestic students. Up to $107,850 stipend scholarship to support a PhD student to research in deep-time exploration for mineral deposits along convergent margins Highlights Value Eligibility Open date Closing date $35,950 pa (for up to 3 years, with a possible 6 month extension) Full-time … Read more…
Welcome to the download page for pyGPlates 0.36. Information about this release may be found on the News page of the GPlates website. This page contains the following sections: Download file descriptions Download file links Download file descriptions There are 21 download files consisting of: Binary installers to install pyGPlates on Windows, macOS and Ubuntu. … Read more…
Welcome Matthew Merkas and Yiyan Wang to the EarthByte Group! They will work with Maria Seton and Michael Chin on “GPlates In Schools” mobile app. The “GPlates-in-schools” program is funded by AuScope, comprising a GPlates app with integrated lesson plans, to provide an Earth Science-focused education engagement initiative. Matthew is an app developer in the EarthByte … Read more…
The EarthByte Group is looking for a research assistant as part of our STELLAR industry project in collaboration with BHP. The casual position will be for up to 10 hours per week on average. The successful applicant can complete these hours through a regular weekly schedule or clump their hours into intensive weekly blocks (i.e., … Read more…
By Adriana Dutkiewicz Abstract: Scientific ocean drilling data collected over half a century have generated a treasure trove of data to map deep sea currents. We have compiled data from more than 200 drill sites to map the continuity of the deep sea sedimentary record and to understand how global warming– or cooling – is … Read more…
Plate tectonics, as the unifying theory in Earth sciences, controls the functioning of important planetary processes on geological timescales. Here, we present an open-source workflow that interrogates community digital plate tectonic reconstructions, primarily in the context of the planetary deep carbon cycle. We present an updated plate tectonic reconstruction covering the last 400 million years … Read more…
Long-lived high to ultra-high temperature (HT-UHT) granulitic terranes formed throughout Earth’s history. Yet, the detailed processes involved in their formation re- main unresolved and notably the sequence of appearance and duration of migmatisa- tion and granulites conditions in the orogenic cycle. These processes can be evaluated by analytical and numerical models. First, solving the steady-state … Read more…
The dependence of abyssal hill roughness on mid-ocean ridge (MOR) spreading rate is an important indicator for faulting and volcanism. I reanalyze this relationship using a global gravity-based prediction of root-mean-square (RMS) heights, enabling dense sampling of RMS/spreading rate space and thus a far more detailed examination than possible with bathymetric data. RMS histograms are … Read more…
