Posts

Dr Ben Mather and Prof Louis Moresi from AuScope’s Simulation, Analysis and Modelling (SAM) program have recently developed a novel, speedy and data-driven way to model the temperature of Earth’s crust in southeastern Australia. Their work has since attracted a grant from the International Association of Mathematical Geosciences (IAMG) to refine the new method and investigate earth temperatures further afield in Alaska.

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’. This is the first module to be built for a common scientific programming language like Python, that supports such ‘wrapping’, or mapping features. Here, developer Dr Ben Mather explains Stripy’s key functions for the AuScope Earth modelling community.

A bit of a late-comer to this game, I’ve just discovered the merits of so-called “continuous integration”. In a Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS) review for stripy, one of the reviewers suggested Travis CI as a way to test if the code is working correctly.

In an Underworld release far, far away… Geodynamicists struggle to model planetary dynamics due to the Cartesian Empire. Physical observations suffer inappropriate meshing and projections bend minds. The Underworld team builds the ultimate weapon to erase the Cartesian nightmare based on the ancient practice of the Cubed-Sphere mesh.

Most of the codes I develop run in parallel using MPI (Message Passing Interface) using the python wrapper, mpi4py. There is a reason why highly scalable programs use this approach, and that is because each processor handles its own chunk of memory and communicates with other processors only when it’s needed.

One common method to determine heat flow in a well is to use a Bullard plot, which graphs thermal resistance (m$^2$K W$^{-1}$) against temperature. The gradient of this line is heat flow, and the uncertainty determined from the error of linear regression.

A method to relate the spatial configuration of mesh nodes to lithology that is differentiable - an adjoint to the inversion of geological structure.

Computing Curie depth from the magnetic anomaly

This is how you go from a jpeg to a csv

An adjoint to the analytical steady-state heat equation