There are many factors as to why the surface of the Earth looks the way it does at this point in history. But perhaps none have been as impactful as the movement of tectonic plates over the course of billions of years.
From the shape of continents and the formation of oceans to expansive mountain ranges and wide basins filled with large – some might say Great – lakes, scientists have been fascinated by the geological processes and history that have formed our world.
Researchers from the University of Memphis acquired allocations on the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) Stampede3 supercomputer through the U.S. National Science Foundation program ACCESS to run high-resolution simulations that reveal how and why continental rifts either progress to fully break apart or halt partway.
Working under the tutelage of Eunseo Choi, an associate professor of computational geodynamics at the Center for Earthquake Research and Information (CERI) at Memphis, doctoral student Kuruvitage Chameera Silva modeled tectonic plate movement, running simulations on Stampede3 to test what would happen to these massive, shifting pieces of Earth’s outer shell under various conditions and forces. The geodynamic duo published their results in Nature Scientific Reports last fall.
The NSF ACCESS program plays a vital role in making supercomputing resources broadly available to researchers across the United States. These supercomputer allocations provided me, as a student researcher, with the high-performance computing resources necessary to conduct the high-resolution continental rifting simulations central to this study, work that would have been impossible on local machines.
–Kuruvitage Chameera Silva, University of Memphis
These insights by Silva and Choi quantitatively link deep Earth processes with surface geology, helping scientists better understand rift failure and potentially leading to new discoveries in geothermal energy and more.
You can read more about this story here: When Continents Try, And Fail, To Break Apart.
Resource Provider Institution(s): Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC)
Resources Used: Stampede3
Affiliations: University of Memphis
Funding Agency: NSF
Grant or Allocation Number(s): MCA08X011
The science story featured here was enabled by the U.S. National Science Foundation’s ACCESS program, which is supported by National Science Foundation grants #2138259, #2138286, #2138307, #2137603, and #2138296.