We are living in an anisotropic world. From rock-building crystals, ice, and trees growing in your garden to your favourite slice of cake many materials or objects has some anisotropic behaviour. What does this mean? Anisotropy (non-isotropy) implies that a material property depends on the direction of the measurement. In geodynamics we often talk about seismic anisotropy, originating from microsc ...[Read More]
Northeast Asia may be one of the best natural laboratories to investigate both arc and intraplate volcanisms which have developed since the mid-Miocene. The arc volcanoes have occurred above the sinking young (Philippine) and old (Pacific) oceanic plates in Southwest and Northeast Japan subduction zones, respectively. The intraplate volcanoes across the Korean Peninsula and China have occurred abo ...[Read More]
Would you like to participate in the development of a completely new research field? Here is the opportunity – Biogeodynamics! Biogeodynamics is an emerging field with exciting research opportunities. In this blog post professors Taras Gerya, Loïc Pellissier, and Robert Stern talk about what is Bio-Geo-Dynamics, how this field is developing, and what are the challenges and opportunities ahead. A n ...[Read More]
The Tibetan Plateau is the most extensive elevated surface on the Earth, stretching ~1,000 km north to south and 3,200 km east to west, with a mean elevation of greater than 4.5 km and located north of the Indian subcontinent. The formation of this Plateau has profoundly influenced the variations and evolution of Asian climate, strengthening of the South-Asian Monsoon, development of the large Asi ...[Read More]
Seismic discontinuities necessitates mechanisms that would generate them and therefore, help us better understand the internal structure of the Earth. This week, Martina Monaco talks about the mysterious X-discontinuity — observed under several hotspots at upper mantle depths of ~ 290 km —and how it relates to the rising plumes. According to the Oxford Dictionary, only 400 words in the English la ...[Read More]
The Earth’s magnetic field plays a prominent role in our everyday life. From birds and bees to many modern-day technologies rely on the magnetic field, and yet, our understanding on its long- and short-term behavior is far from complete. In this week’s post, Annique van der Boon shows how geology and paleomagnetic studies can help us in understanding the long-term activity of EarthR ...[Read More]
Did you know that there are big, blob-like anomalies in the deep mantle which are larger than a continent and rise up to hundreds of kilometers from the core-mantle boundary? Today’s post is all about those blobs and what we know and do not know about them. If you want to know more about why these blobs are so interesting to study, check out this other cool blog post by Jamie Ward. If you look at ...[Read More]
2022 Ada Lovelace Workshop on Numerical Modelling of Mantle and Lithosphere Dynamics is finally coming! Have you got started packing for travelling to Hungary? I got you something to read about on your way to the workshop. Who is Ada Lovelace? The workshop, previously known as the ‘International Workshops on Mantle and Lithosphere Dynamics’, was renamed in 2018 by the EGU Topical Events Committee ...[Read More]
While we have sent several rovers to Mars, drilling down even just to the mantle of our own planet is a challenge that we are yet to overcome. How is it then that we know all these things about our planet’s interior? It turns out, we do not need to be inside the Earth to know what is happening there. Observations from geophysics and geochemistry can inform us about the processes and the properties ...[Read More]
This week, Dr. Eunseo Choi, a professor at the Center for Earthquake Research and Information, the University of Memphis, talks about tectonic modelling using DES3D. *Spoiler alert* read till the end for an exciting opportunity to work on it The advent of the open-source movement and the free public software repositories such as GitHub have drastically improved the way research codes are maintaine ...[Read More]