Software Developer required at EarthByte

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Basin GENESIS Hub logo

A Software Developer position is available at EarthByte. The position will focus on the development, engineering, and maintenance of complex open-source, surface processes and geodynamics modelling software for the ARC-ITRH Basin GENESIS Hub. The total package offered is $100K-$127K p.a. for a full-time, fixed term 12 months (renewal possible). Applications close 24 January 2016. Click … Read more…

History and current advances in reconstructing the Earth through deep geological time

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Rodinia 1000 Ma

Rodinia 1000 MaTime machine: History and current advances in reconstructing the Earth through deep geological time – an article on Quartz by Steve LeVine. The article is a review of the development of ideas and technologies in reconstructing the Earth through deep time, aimed at understanding supercontinent assembly, breakup and dispersal, starting with Alfred Wegener. The article focusses on research activities in the context of the IGCP 648 project ‘Supercontinent Cycles and Global Geodynamics‘ led by Zheng-Xiang Li. The piece provides some historical context, and highlights the work of a number of leading scientists, postdoctoral researchers and PhD students currently involved in this work.  … Read more…

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Deep Carbon Modelling and Visualisation Project

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The Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) is a 10-year international research initiative to connect scientists from diverse fields and facilitate collaborative research and technology development in the field of deep carbon science. In order to address barriers to communicating the planetary carbon cycle to the public, a Modeling and Visualization workshop was held in May 2015 in Washington D.C. to bring … Read more…

Mammerickx Microplate media coverage

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Mammerickx Microplate zoom

Mammerickx Microplate zoomThe recent EPSL article on the discovery of the Mammerickx Microplate, by Dr Kara Matthews, Prof Dietmar Müller and Prof David Sandwell, has received lots of media attention from many different countries around the world including Australia, UK, USA, India, Pakistan, Mexico, Nepal and Honduras.

See below for a list of media items:

Online Media
The biggest continental collision in Earth’s history: Scientists pinpoint crashing together of continents that created the Himalayas 50 million years ago – Daily Mail
Scientists fix date for earth-shattering Himalayan birth pangs – The Sydney Morning Herald
Microplate discovery dates birth of Himalayas – EurekAlert!
Himalayas: Discovery of first ancient Indian Ocean microplate hints at new date of formation of mountain range – Yahoo! News  … Read more…

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Nicky Wright is awarded the Chris Powell Medal

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Nicky Wright Receives Chris Powell Medal

A big congratulations to PhD student Nicky Wright who was awarded the Chris Powell Medal for Postgraduate Research in Tectonics and Structural Geology from the Geological Society of Australia SGTSG. The medal is awarded at each regular field conference of the SGTSG for an outstanding research paper arising from postgraduate research on some aspect of … Read more…

EarthByte welcomes Megan Korchinski

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Megan Korchinski

EarthByte welcomes Megan Korchinski, a visiting PhD student from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA. Megan will be studying with us for the next 3 months at the University of Sydney. Megan is part of the Structure Tectonics And Metamorphic Petrology (STAMP) research group, and is interested in the exhumation mechanisms of subducted continental crust. … Read more…

Gordon Bell Prize 2015

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Gordon Bell Prize image

Long-term EarthByte collaborator, Prof Mike Gurnis (Caltech), is part of a team that has just received the prestigious Gordon Bell Prize for pushing the boundaries of supercomputing in the application of the most realistic numerical model of mantle convection and plate tectonics. Related News IBM wants to predict earthquakes and volcanoes with Watson Gordon Bell … Read more…

Preliminary Insights from Northwest Shelf Drilling (Exp. 356)

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Speaker Assoc Prof Stephen Gallagher, University of Melbourne. Date & Time Friday 13 November, 11 AM Location Madsen Building, Level 4 – Conference Room Summary This expedition aimed to examine the 5 million year history of the Indonesian Throughflow, Australian monsoon and subsidence on the northwest shelf of Australia.

Ancient Indian Ocean microplate discovery dates birth of Himalayas

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Mammerickx Microplate

Mammerickx MicroplateAn international team of scientists led by the University of Sydney’s School of Geosciences has discovered that the crustal stresses caused by the initial collision between India and Eurasia cracked the Antarctic Plate far away from the collisional zone and broke off a fragment the size of Tasmania in a remote patch of the central Indian Ocean.

The ongoing tectonic collision between the two continents produces enormous geological stresses that build up along the Himalayas and lead to numerous earthquakes every year – but now scientists have unravelled how stressed the Indian Plate became 47 million years ago when its northern edge first collided with Eurasia. … Read more…

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EarthByte projects available for Honours students in 2016

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BGH basin main

EarthByte has now released a list of projects for potential Honours students for 2016. The project topics span: The role of mechanical stratigraphy in the structural style of deformed sedimentary basins Understanding the formation Earth’s largest continental ribbon: The Lord Howe Rise Evolution of the Australian climate and landscape over the last 100 Myr Unravelling … Read more…

GMT version 5.2 released!

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GMT logo

Version 5.2 of the Generic Mapping Tools (GMT) software was released today! GMT is the widely used open-source software for manipulating and visualising geographic and cartesian data. The latest EarthByte global plate rotation model (Müller et al., in press) is now the default rotation model used in the GMT ‘SPOTTER‘ supplement.

Ocean basin evolution and global-scale plate reorganization events since Pangea breakup

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Seafloor ages from Müller et al.

Seafloor ages from Müller et al.Citation
Müller R.D., Seton, M., Zahirovic, S., Williams, S.E., Matthews, K.J., Wright, N.M., Shephard, G.E., Maloney, K.T., Barnett-Moore, N., Hosseinpour, M., Bower, D.J., Cannon, J., 2016. Ocean basin evolution and global-scale plate reorganization events since Pangea breakup, Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Vol 44, 107-138. DOI: 10.1146/annurev-earth-060115-012211.

Abstract
We present a revised global plate motion model with continuously closing plate boundaries ranging from the Triassic at 230 Ma to the present day, assess differences between alternative absolute plate motion models, and review global tectonic events. Relatively high mean absolute plate motion rates around 9–10 cm yr-1 between 140 and 120 Ma may be related to transient plate motion accelerations driven by the successive emplacement of a sequence of large igneous provinces during that time. … Read more…

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Dr Nico Flament receives a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award

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Nicolas Flament

Nicolas FlamentCongratulations to Dr Nicolas Flament for being awarded a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) from the Australian Research Council!

Below are some details about Nico’s project (2016-2019) entitled ‘The geodynamics of past sea level changes‘:

This project is designed to quantify the effect of flow deep within Earth’s interior on past sea-level changes and on the flooding history of Australia over the last 550 million years. The rise and fall of sea level has shaped our planet over time. This project plans to combine recent advances in tectonic reconstructions and dynamic Earth models with the global and Australian rock record. … Read more…

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Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) proposal funded

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Global plate reconstruction

A Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) Proposal, designed to study the interaction of subduction zones with carbonate platforms through time in terms of CO2 cycles, submitted to the Smithsonian Institution and prepared to a large extent by Dr Sabin Zahirovic and EarthByte Research Assistant Jodie Pall, was successful, raising $US36k. The DCO actually doubled our proposed budget from … Read more…

Basin Hub features in NCI Newsletter

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Basin GENESIS Hub logo

The Basin GENESIS Hub was featured in NCI’s Newsletter entitled ‘Basin GENESIS Hub Launched‘. NCI Director Professor Lindsay Botten said NCI’s role in the Hub highlighted the importance of high-performance computing in industry-relevant research. “NCI is delighted to support this high-profile ARC Industry Transformation Hub, led by Professor Müller,” Professor Botten said. “Projects of this excellence, and … Read more…

EarthByte welcomes PhD Student Xuesong Ding

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Xuesong Ding

EarthByte welcomes new PhD student Xuesong Ding who’s PhD project focuses on exploring the interplay between changes in sea level and in dynamic topography on the sequence stratigraphy of Australia’s northern margin, from the North West Shelf (NWS) to Papua New Guinea (PNG).

Ore Geology Reviews – Prospectivity of Western Australian iron ore from geophysical data using a reject option classifier

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Prospectivity of Western Australian iron ore from geophysical data using a reject option classifier - figure

Merdith, A. S., Landgrebe, T. C., & Müller, R. D. (2015). Prospectivity of Western Australian iron ore from geophysical data using a reject option classifier. Ore Geology Reviews. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.oregeorev.2015.03.014 Prospectivity of Western Australian iron ore from geophysical data using a reject option classifier Download supplementary material – zip file

Prospectivity of Western Australian iron ore from geophysical data using a reject option classifier

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Prospectivity of Western Australian iron ore from geophysical data using a reject option classifier - figure

Prospectivity of Western Australian iron ore from geophysical data using a reject option classifier - figureCitation
Merdith, A. S., Landgrebe, T. C., & Müller, R. D. (2015). Prospectivity of Western Australian iron ore from geophysical data using a reject option classifier. Ore Geology Reviews. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.oregeorev.2015.03.014

Abstract
There has recently been a rapid growth in the amount and quality of digital geological and geophysical data for the majority of the Australian continent. Coupled with an increase in computational power and the rising impor- tance of computational methods, there are new possibilities for a large scale, low expenditure digital exploration of mineral deposits. Here we use a multivariate analysis of geophysical datasets to develop a methodology that utilises machine learning algorithms to build and train two-class classifiers for provincial-scale, greenfield min- eral exploration. … Read more…

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Seafloor lithology of the ocean basins

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Lithology globe Aus Ant view

Lithology globe Aus Ant viewCitation
Dutkiewicz, A., Müller, R. D., O’Callaghan, S., & Jónasson, H. (2015). Census of seafloor sediments in the world’s ocean. Geology, G36883-1. doi: 10.1130/G36883.1.

Abstract
Knowing the patterns of distribution of sediments in the global ocean is critical for understanding biogeochemical cycles and how deep-sea deposits respond to environmental change at the sea surface. We present the first digital map of seafloor lithologies based on descriptions of nearly 14,500 samples from original cruise reports, interpolated using a support vector machine algorithm. We show that sediment distribution is more complex, with significant deviations from earlier hand-drawn maps, and that major lithologies occur in drastically different proportions globally. … Read more…

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Resolution and Revelation – Strategies for imaging and exploring the Earth’s crust and near-surface

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Speaker
Assoc Prof Anya Reading, UTAS.

Date & Time
Tuesday 20 October, 11 AM

Location
Madsen Building, Level 4 – Conference Room

Abstract
Highlights of research in computational geophysics from the UTAS group in recent years are presented. In the quest for improved resolution of contrasts in structure in the Earth’s crust, the use of ambient seismic energy is outlined together with results from recent field experiments in southeast Australia. Moving up the frequency range, a novel ambient energy technique for characterising upper layers of cover for minerals targeting will also
be covered.  … Read more…

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Granular physics in geosciences

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Speaker Prof Itai Einav, School of Civil Engineering. Date & Time Wednesday 14 October, 11 AM Location Madsen Building, Level 3 – Room 336 Summary During this seminar Prof Itai Einav will provide an overview for some of the research activities carried out in the Particles and Grains Laboratory (PGL) at the School of Civil … Read more…

Simon Williams reports from the TECTA Cruise

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Water Column mapping of the Tasman Sea from the TECTA voyage

Water Column mapping of the Tasman Sea from the TECTA voyageEarthByter Simon Williams is currently part of an international team of scientists sailing around the Tasman Sea on board the French Research Vessel ‘L’Atalante’. The voyage is collecting geophysical data that will help to unravel the mysteries of Earth’s geodynamic evolution and subduction initiation East of Australia, as well as profound changes in Southwest Pacific climate and ocean currents through geological history. To read the news from the voyage, download the PDF newsletters below.

Newsletter Number 1, 10 September 2015 – pdf
Newsletter Number 2, 17 September 2015 – pdf
Newsletter Number 3, 25 September 2015 – pdf
Newsletter Number 4, 1 October 2015 – pdf
… Read more…

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