Congratulations to the new Australian Academy of Science Fellow Prof Dietmar Muller

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Prof Dietmar Muller, EarthByter at the School of Geosciences, University of Sydney, was elected a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science for his work on charting the evolution of the Earth through deep time. He is a world-leading geophysicist whose research has transformed our understanding of the Earth’s evolution over the past 200 million years. … Read more…

Australian NW Shelf sediments reveal climate shifts through the eons

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Global climate underwent a major reorganization when the Antarctic ice sheet expanded ~14 million years ago (Ma). This event affected global atmospheric circulation, including the strength and position of the westerlies and the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), and, therefore, precipitation patterns. Stephen Gallagher, a member of the ARC Basin Genesis Hub node at the Univ. … Read more…

EarthByters selected as exceptional reviewers for GSA journals

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EarthByters selected as exceptional reviewers for GSA journals Several Australian geologists and geophysicists have been selected as exceptional reviewers for Geological Society of America journals, for prompt, insightful, meticulous, and tactful reviews. Nicolas Flament was selected for his reviews of Lithosphere papers, and Dietmar Muller for Geosphere reviews. Other Australians honoured for their quality reviews … Read more…

Colombia GPlates Course

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During the second week of May, Earthbyte Alumnus Nicholas Barnett-Moore visited a research group at the National University of Colombia, Medellín, under the coordination of Assistant Professor Agustin Cardona and Associate Professor Gaspar Monsalve to teach a one-week intensive course on the plate reconstruction software, GPlates. The primary research interests of this group were focused … Read more…

Understanding the Deep Carbon Cycle from Icehouse to Greenhouse Climates

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Sydney Research Excellence Initiative grant (2017-2018) Research area, key questions, significance, and innovation. The planet is experiencing a major transition from an icehouse climate, one dominated by permanent continental ice sheets at high latitudes, to a greenhouse climate that favours ice-free conditions. Although part of the deglaciation trend is influenced by a natural orbital cycle, … Read more…

A full-plate global reconstruction of the Neoproterozoic

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Author List:  Andrew Merdith, Alan Collins, Simon Williams, Sergei Pisarevsky, John Foden, Donnelly Archibald, Morgan Blades, Brandon Alessio, Sheree Armistead, Diana Plavsa, Chris Clark, Dietmar Müller Citation: Merdith, Andrew & Collins, Alan & Williams, Simon & Pisarevsky, Sergei & Foden, John & Archibald, Donnelly & Blades, Morgan & Alessio, Brandon & Armistead, Sheree & Plavsa, Diana & Clark, Chris … Read more…

Australasian IODP Regional Planning Workshop

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Date: June 13-16, 2017 Venue: The University of Sydney The workshop is co-organised by Neville Exon (Australian National University), Karsten Gohl (Alfred Wegener Institut), Michael Gurnis (California Institute of Technology), Stuart Henrys (GNS Science, Wellington), Fumio Inagaki (JAMSTEC), Rob McKay (Victoria University, Wellington), Dietmar Mueller (University of Sydney, Conference Host), Dhananjai Pandey (NCAOR, India), Amelia … Read more…

EarthByte offers spatio-temporal modeling resources to researchers and the public

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In 2016, the EarthByte group, based in the School of Geosciences at the University of Sydney, created a visualization tool and model to measure the interactions of arc volcanism with buried carbonate platforms in deep time. The new workflow tools, which are available to the DCO community, enable scientists to approximate paleo-atmospheric CO2 flux within … Read more…

Model of Australia’s Tectonic Stress May Future-Proof Carbon Storage

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In response to ever-rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, some countries are exploring carbon sequestration as a way to mitigate the effects of this greenhouse gas. The general strategy is to inject carbon dioxide more than a mile underground, beneath an impermeable rock layer, where it can dissolve into fluids and crystallize. Injection locations … Read more…

Postdoctoral Research Associate in carbonate platform numerical modeling

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Applications are invited for a postdoctoral fellowship working as a member of both the EarthByte & Geocoastal Research Groups in the School of Geosciences at the University of Sydney as part of 1-year Sydney Research Excellence Initiative project. The position will focus on using observational carbonate reef geology to design and calibrate numerical carbonate stratigraphic … Read more…

Curtin Basin Genesis Hub team scoops bronze in international geoscience awards

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A team of students from the WA School of Mines, Curtin University, has picked up the bronze medal in the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) Imperial Barrel Award competition in Houston, Texas. The Imperial Barrel Award (IBA) is an annual competition for geoscience graduate students from universities around the world, simulating the exploration work … Read more…

The effect of continental stress on carbon storage sites

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Mitigating global warming by CO2 storage? Check for the continental stressitis. If proposed CO2 sites are not properly assessed for long-term stability,  future civilisations could still suffer the consequences of global warming. Professor Dietmar Müller from the School of Geosciences at the University of Sydney and Scott Dyksterhuis from ExxonMobil have created a computer model … Read more…

A Paleomagnetic Database for GPlates: PaleoPoles, Declination Arrows, and PaleoLatitudes

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A PaleomagneticPmag Tutorial Image Database that has been assembled for use with the program, GPlates.  The paleomagnetic database presented here is made up of 1638 paleopoles compiled by Rob Van der Voo for his book, Paleomagnetism of the Atlantic, Tethys, and Iapetus Oceans.  In addition to the spreadsheet of paleopoles, we have constructed five feature collections that can be used to visualize the paleomagnetic data using GPlates:  1) site localities, 2) paleopoles, 3) declination arrows, 4) paleolatitude labels, and a set of time-dependent rasters which plot the site locations, paleopoles, declination arrows, and paleolatitude labels on a set of plate tectonic reconstructions ( 0 – 540 Ma).  The last section of this report is a detailed discussion of the paleomagnetic data for three-time intervals (40Ma, 285Ma, and 450Ma).  The Supplementary Materials includes a program, “PaleoPolePlotter”, which GPlates users can use to build paleopoles, declination arrows, and paleolatitude labels from user-defined data sets
 … Read more…

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AAPG Barrel Award Competition

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A team of Petroleum Geology honours and masters students from Curtin University has won the Asia Pacific heat of the American Association of Petroleum Geologist’s (AAPG) Imperial Barrel Award (IBA) competition. The IBA is an annual competition for geoscience graduate students from universities around the world which simulates work done by geologists and geophysicists in … Read more…

Zealandia: Earth’s Hidden Continent

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ZealandiaA paper published in GSA Today, Zealandia: Earth’s Hidden Continent, by Nick Mortimer and colleagues, including EarthByte’s Dr Maria Seton, has gone viral over the last few days. In the paper, researchers have for the first time clearly defined Zealandia, a continent that includes New Zealand, New Caledonia, and the Lord Howe and Norfold Islands, that is today 94% submerged beneath the Pacific Ocean. According to GSA Today’s editors, the article is “by a long shot” their most downloaded article ever. Picked up by hundreds of media outlets worldwide, the findings of the paper has reached an estimated 720 million readers!

You can download the paper here. … Read more…

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Badlands v2.0 is released

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Today version 2.0 of Badlands has been released This release add new capabilities to the code: simulates river entering in the simulation area output of Chi parameter in Hdf5 flow network multi-erodibility layers creation 3D stratigraphic layer displacements This release is compatible with version 1.0.0 and will work with similar XML input files. Download Badlands (source … Read more…

Basin Genesis Hub computer model explains Early Cretaceous eastward flow of ancient Murray River

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Murray_RiverAustralia is an outstanding natural laboratory to study the influence of dynamic topography on landscape evolution, having been largely unaffected by tectonic deformation since the Jurassic. Recent studies of the past eastern Australian landscape from present-day longitudinal river profiles and from mantle flow models suggest that the interaction of plate motion with mantle convection accounts for the two phases of large-scale uplift of the region since 120 Ma. … Read more…

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Modelling and visualizing distributed compressional plate deformation using GPlates2.0: The Arctic Eurekan Orogeny

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Gion_etal_figPresent-day distributed plate deformation is being mapped and simulated in great detail, largely based on satellite observations.  In contrast, the modelling of and data assimilation into deforming plate models for the geological past is still in its infancy.  The recently released GPLates2.0 software provides a framework for building plate models including diffuse deformation.  … Read more…

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