This article was originally published by AuScope, Australia’s provider of research infrastructure to the Earth and Geospatial Science community. AuScope is an Australian Government (NCRIS) organisation that has enabled the research, or research infrastructure, described here. Author: Meghan Miller, edited by Jo Condon.

I am locked in a small hotel in Hobart turned into a quarantine, tempted to write a story named “Tasmanian quarantine”, but, honestly, I can’t.   I could lament how unlucky, or brag how courageous we are to endure this isolation. I could show you how tiny the room is, in which I feel I could touch all corners at once if I stretched my hands and legs wide enough.

I decided to simplify the title of our new paper (Muir & Tkalčić), significantly, for the purposes of presenting it to a general audience.

C' shear bands are a common feature of ductile shear zones and are widely used as kinematic indicators. They are also enigmatic: research on naturally- and experimentally- deformed rocks has suggested several theories as to why they form, but there is little consensus.

Western Australia is often thought as barren land. But in an age before even the rise of the dinosaurs, when the continents were still joined in a great ‘supercontinent’ called Gondwana, a massive river ran the breadth of WA, shaping the land and laying sediments that now host some of Australia’s richest energy reserves.

Caroline Eakin, ANU The Earth's biggest earthquakes and most explosive volcanoes occur at subduction zones" where a tectonic plate (the seafloor itself) sinks bank into the Earth's interior. We've been able to compile 100 million years of existing evidence for Subduction Zone Initiation (SZI). One of the biggest things this showed was that subduction breeds subduction.

A new study by an international team of scientists has found lockdown measures to stop the spread of COVID-19 led to a 50 per cent reduction in seismic noise observed around the world. It is the largest reduction in human-generated noise ever observed globally.

Meghan S. Miller, Australian National University and Louis Moresi, Australian National University Our responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have dramatically changed human activity all over the world. People are working from home, schools are closed in many places, travel is restricted, and in some cases only essential shops and businesses are open. Scientists see signs of these changes wherever they look.

The ANU Research School of Earth Sciences is moving all seminars online for the duration of the corona virus emergency The Research School of Earth Sciences (RSES) at the Australian National University is one of the world’s premier research institutions in the Earth and Marine Sciences. The seminar series is the central focus of the School’s activities and typically attracts top researchers from Australia and around the world.

A new paper by John Mansour and others has just been published in the Journal of Open Source Software. The JOSS paper is intended as a reference citation for recent iterations of the code and is specifically tied to the recent v2.9 release.

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.