heat flow

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.

An efficient inversion framework that gives improved estimates of the thermal state of the crust in Victoria using heat flow measurements and Curie depth in a joint inversion using 3D geological models, and numerical models of thermal diffusion. The outcome of this work is an estimation of the basal heat flux, thermal properties and the heat production rates for the various domains in the model together with uncertainty information.

The temperature distribution in the crust, and associated uncertainty, was simulated from the ensemble of Curie depth realisations assigned to a lower thermal boundary condition of a crustal model (inc. sedimentary thickness, Moho depth, heat production, thermal conductivity), constructed from various geophysical and geochemical data sets.

Make a palaeoclimate correction to heat flow data

Regions where surface temperature has increased since past glaciation events, such as Ireland, underestimate the heat output of the …

The surface heat flow field in Australia has for many years been poorly constrained compared to continental regions elsewhere. 182 …