Modelling temperature in the Earth’s crust is accomplished by populating a geological model with thermal properties, such as thermal conductivity and rates of heat production, and solving a numerical model of thermal diffusion with assigned boundary conditions.

Chronicles from our 2019 voyage aboard the RV Investigator to the Coral Sea to sample underwater volcanoes on the submerged continent of Zealandia

Geodynamicists from Sydney and Australian National universities have developed Stripy, a software module that allows scientists to efficiently place GIS ‘wrapping paper’ around the spherical Earth ‘present’.

Making your research reproducible means that you provide the entire workflow from data, through software and post-processing freely available. Not only can somebody repeat your experiments and verify them, they can build upon them. In lab-based disciplines, there are many further challenges, but in research that is predominantly based on data processing, this ought to be an achievable goal.

Zenodo is a repository for immutable versions of software that are provided with a persistent DOI for the purposes of citation and reproducibility. Underworld can be cited via a zenodo DOI.

Cratons are anomalously-strong regions of the continents that have largely resisted tectonic forces for billions of years. How such strong zones could be forged in a hot, low-viscosity, low stress, early-Earth has been a long-standing puzzle for geologists. Adam Beall, Katie Cooper and Louis Moresi have recently proposed that cratons were made by the catastrophic switching on of plate tectonics.

Modelling the relative time-scales of the Rayleigh-Taylor Instability and delamination, using Underworld Why model sub-continental gravitational instabilities? Within the plate tectonics framework, continents are generally considered to have a much lower density than the asthenosphere below and therefore avoid the kind of recycling that the oceanic crust and lithosphere undergoes.

In a recent paper [1], we used Underworld models to examine subduction congestion associated with the ingestion of a continental ribbon. The SE Australian geological record turned out to be a wonderful place to study this process. Here is a short summary of the work for a relatively non-technical audience that we put together and some additional figures which I prepared.