Thorsten W. Becker Jackson School of Geosciences The University of Texas at Austin Visualizations

Most 2D plots are made with GMT, and 3D rendering done with Paraview. For information on how to make such maps and use GMT and iGMT, see my computing and Earth science mapping teaching material and the Unified Geodynamics Earth Science Computing Environment (UGESCE). Also see my GMT to VTK conversion tools.

• Thermal convection animations

  
  A number of different Rayleigh number and parameter variation cases can be found on the thermal convection animations page.

• Reconstructed seafloor age and continental drift

  Several animations of continental drift and seafloor spreading can be found on the plate reconstruction visualization section.

• Global and regional lithospheric deformation styles from moment tensors

  (Click on thumbnails for larger PDF maps.) Shallow Global CMT solutions Kostrov summed and colored by the mean horizontal strain (negative: compression, zero: strike-slip, positive: extention). See legend for bin size and depth selection criteria.

• Mantle convection cells visualized

  Paraview visualization of tomographically imaged low velocity piles (LLSVPs, red isosurface), shear wave anomalies at 1000 km depth (translucent surface), and mantle flow for the present-day (streaklines). Computed with HC.

• Tomography slab profile surfing

  
  

• Double slab dynamics movies by Adam Holt

  Supplementary material from
  • Holt, A. F., Royden, L. H., and Becker, T. W.: The dynamics of double slab subduction. Geophys. J. Int., 209, 250-265, 2017. (PDF)
  1. reference, single slab case
     
  2. Outward
     
  3. Inward
     
  4. In sync (cf. Jagoutz et al., 2015)
     

• Earth's internal dynamics and surface geology

  Composite by David Evans (Yale), Bruce Eglington (U Saskatchewan), and myself showing Auer et al.'s (2014) tomography for the mantle, Bruce's geological unit compilation for the continents, and Mueller et al.'s (2008) seafloor-age model for the oceans.

• Geoid anomalies

  
  EGM360 geoid anomaly corrected for the shape of an hydrostatic, layered Earth (Nakiboglu). Click here for an equatorial movie of geoid anomalies, and a polar path movie of geoid anomalies.
  

• Mantle convection and plate tectonics

  
  As used in modified form in Becker (2010), and featured in Discover magazine online!
  
  For details of these mantle circulation computations, see Becker and Faccenna (2011).

• Thermal (mantle) convection models

  bottom heated	internally heated

  Snapshots from 3-D, spherical, thermal convection (computed using Citcom by Zhong et al., 2000). Plots show hot (red) and cold (blue) temperature anomaly isosurfaces. Also see our 2-D convection animations.

• Tibetan collision

  
  
  Topography and GPS data (Zhang et al., 2004, Gan et al., 2007, as used in Becker and Faccenna, 2011, see there for complete references) in Eurasia fixed reference frame.

• Global tectonic maps

  
  See the global tectonic maps web page for different projections and datasets.

• Southern California time-lapse seismicity animation

  Download a 150MB GIF animation of all earthquakes in the Hauksson et al. (2011) catalog. Download a 50MB GIF animation of all earthquakes in the Ross et al. (2019) catalog.

• Spherical harmonics visualizations

  

• Hardebeck & Shearer (2004) HASH focal mechanism map for southern California (8MB PDF)

• Most recent PBO GPS velocity solution

  The UNAVCO consortium ran the Plate Boundary Observatory (PBO) component of the NSF Earthscope program. The map below shows the most recent GPS solutions from PBO for western North America, using the given stable North America reference frame, and then correcting all solutions such that the region from -107/-100/30/49 is stable (i.e. an approximate mid U.S. reference frame).
  
  
  For the most recent plot, click here: [PNG] [PDF]. To track how stations come online and solution quality improves, you might also want to check out the [PBO GPS data movie], the [interpolated PBO GPS data movie], or the [PBO GPS Plot Archive].