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Geodynamics

Geodynamics

Mathematical closed-form solutions in Geodynamics: insightful or detrimental?

and January 14, 2026
Mathematical closed-form solutions in Geodynamics: insightful or detrimental?
(credit: modified from Unsplash)

Mathematics is certainly not every scientist’s cup of tea. Despite the latter, they are, for the most part, very important, since most problems, regardless of their complexity, start and end with a mathematical equation (or set of equations). In this week’s blog, Dimitrios Papadomarkakis (student at the National Technical University of Athens), discusses the subject of closed-form (analytical) sol ...[Read More]

Building the Earth in a sandbox

and January 7, 2026
Fentale Volcano

  Building the Earth in a sandbox   The Main Ethiopian Rift stretches for hundreds of kilometers through Ethiopia, a massive fracture where Africa is slowly tearing apart to birth a new ocean. However, the processes driving this continental breakup remain hidden deep beneath layers of volcanic rock and millions of years of geological history. Today, in a laboratory in the heart of the be ...[Read More]

Cratons: building blocks of continents and their economic importance

, and December 17, 2025
Cratons: building blocks of continents and their economic importance
A map showing how mineral deposits are often concentrated along the edges of the thick lithosphere. The coloured boxes represent distribution of large igneous intrusions, which contains Ni-Cu-PGE deposits and the circles represent distribution of carbonatites which might contain REEs (Lithosphere thickness data from Priestley et al, 2024, Carbonatite locations from Liu et al., 2022, large igneous intrusion locations from Smith and Maier, 2021)

The 4.5 billion years of geologic evolution has shaped the tectonic processes in Earth we see today. Over the span of time, Earth has changed from being a magma ocean to a tectonically active planet, by transitioning through different tectonic regimes.  A silent witness of this journey have been cratons which have survived for billions of years. Therefore cratons preserve clues of past tectonic pr ...[Read More]