Tinted detail of a photo: Wet sand on a beach rippled into many small wavy ridges, with a shallow channel of water behind and grassy land below sharp, dark, partly snow-dusted peaks under white clouds.
GD
Geodynamics

Menno Fraters

Menno is a postdoctoral fellow at UC Davis in the USA. He investigates the interplay between the crust and the mantle through numerical modelling, with a focus on the study of subduction zones. He is a primary developer and maintainer of both the geodynamics code ASPECT and the initial conditions generator code the Geodynamic World Builder. Menno is part of the GD blog team as an editor.

Making software available: open source licenses

open source initiative logo

When you are writing some code for your upcoming paper, you may want (or need) to make the code available. Just making it available to see somewhere doesn’t automatically make it open source software though. In this post I will provide you, based on my experience of having to choose a license, a brief introduction …[Read More]

2022 ASPECT Users Workshop

2022 ASPECT virtual user workshop

On January 19th and 20th, ASPECT had it’s annual virtual user workshop. With more than 60 participants, the virtual workshop has grown quite a bit since it started in 2020. This two day world-wide virtual event was full of great developments and showing exiting new applications in which ASPECT is being used.  I will give …[Read More]

Additional teaching tips

Additional teaching tips

In June 2020 I made (my first!) blog post for the EGU blog on the topic of teaching, describing what I learned by for the first time teaching a full class on my own. It was at the time when teaching suddenly had to shift from in person to online teaching. Last quarter I was …[Read More]

5 additional geodynamic movies to watch

5 additional geodynamic movies to watch

More than a year ago Iris made a great list of geodynamics themed (bad) movies. Since there are so many amazingly bad (and a few good) geodynamics themed movies out there, we felt that it was time for some additional movie recommendations. I tried to keep the list varied with some over-the-top movies and some …[Read More]

ASPECT 2021 hackathon

Minions with or versus dinos?

Last year we introduced the ASPECT hackaton on this geodynamics blog. It was the first hackathon which went virtual which brought a whole set of new challenges. This year was the 8th version of the yearly hackathon, and it was still virtual (unfortunately). Fortunately lessons where learned from the previous virutal hackathon and generally from …[Read More]

Starting to teach? Here are 3 tips!

Starting to teach? Here are 3 tips!

Starting to teach a course at a university can be an exciting but daunting experience. In today’s post Menno Fraters shares his experiences of starting to teach a class of 100+ students during the challenging time of the COVID-19 pandemic. He provides three quick tips for when you start teaching, that may be useful for …[Read More]