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 on what the difference is, why your code needs a license and what license may ...[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 here a short summary of the topics which where presented and discussed, ...[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 teaching again, but now the situation was the reverse. We had to move from online teaching back to in person teaching. In thi ...[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 which are very down to earth, or in some cases more correctly phrased: down into the eart ...[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 working more than a year online. Therefore a short bl ...[Read More]

Expand your toolbox: Three new programming languages to try out

Will you add a new programming lanuage to your toolbox?

Geodynamists usually do at least a bit of programming, but in many cases a lot of programming, although that might just be my academic bubble. Most of that programming is done in programming languages that have been around at least since the 80’s (Fortran, C and C++) or early 90’s (Python). These programming languages have of course evolved considerably over time, but new languages keep popping up ...[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 teaching in academics. During your time as a PhD student, you may have al ...[Read More]