Dr. Ben Mather

Dr. Ben Mather

ARC Industry Research Fellow

I am an ARC Industry Research Fellow in the School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at The University of Melbourne. I am an expert in fusing Earth evolution models with data to understand how groundwater moves critical minerals through the landscape. Related research interests include the cycling of volatiles within the Earth, probabilistic thermal models of the lithosphere to unravel past tectonic and climatic events, and understanding the how enigmatic volcanoes form.

I am a vocal advocate for the integral role of geoscience in responding to challenges we face in transitioning to the carbon-neutral economy. As an expert in my field, I have been interviewed in national and international print media, TV, and radio on a wide variety of subjects including earthquakes, volcanoes, groundwater, and critical minerals.

Tracing ancient groundwater to discover copper featured image

Tracing ancient groundwater to discover copper

An update on the 'Go with the flow' project — an ARC Industry Research Fellowship with BHP that combines continent-scale groundwater modelling with copper exploration to find new …

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Dr. Ben Mather
Inversion and Uncertainty Quantification featured image

Inversion and Uncertainty Quantification

Use cutting-edge tools to appraise exploration uncertainty

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Dr. Ben Mather
Earth Evolution Modelling featured image

Earth Evolution Modelling

Simulate fluid and heat transfer within the Earth

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Dr. Ben Mather
Deep Time Data Mining featured image

Deep Time Data Mining

Interrogating plate reconstructions to target mineral deposits using AI

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Dr. Ben Mather
Subducting seafloor anomalies promote porphyry copper emplacement featured image

Subducting seafloor anomalies promote porphyry copper emplacement

“With copper demand projected to increase by 350% by 2050 for renewable energy and electric vehicles, understanding the formation of porphyry copper deposits is critical. We …

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Dr. Ben Mather
Our latest paper reveals how plate tectonics has driven Earth's climate shifts featured image

Our latest paper reveals how plate tectonics has driven Earth's climate shifts

New research published in Communications Earth & Environment shows that the balance between volcanic outgassing and carbon sequestration into oceanic lithosphere is the key driver …

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Dr. Ben Mather
Carbon emissions along divergent plate boundaries modulate icehouse-greenhouse climates featured image

Carbon emissions along divergent plate boundaries modulate icehouse-greenhouse climates

Carbon emissions along divergent plate boundaries modulate icehouse-greenhouse climate transitions through mid-ocean ridge and rift degassing.

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Dr. Ben Mather
Mapping craton edges to find critical metals featured image

Mapping craton edges to find critical metals

Our new paper in Geoscience Frontiers uses full-waveform seismic tomography and machine learning to map craton boundaries worldwide — and shows that 85% of target mineral deposits …

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Dr. Ben Mather
Craton boundary detection from full-waveform tomography model reveals links to critical metal deposits featured image

Craton boundary detection from full-waveform tomography model reveals links to critical metal deposits

Using full-waveform seismic tomography to detect craton boundaries and their spatial links to critical metal deposit locations.

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Hojat Shirmard
Ray + Zarr: a better way to scale plate reconstruction workflows featured image

Ray + Zarr: a better way to scale plate reconstruction workflows

Why I've moved from Dask to Ray for distributed raster processing, and why Zarr is the natural storage format to pair with it.

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Dr. Ben Mather