This $191,710 federal Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's Geosciences Program (CFDA 47.050) is supporting a collaborative research effort to address fundamental issues linking great earthquakes with plate tectonics. The interdisciplinary team, led by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), is developing advanced computational methods and algorithms to enable the simulation of long-term tectonic plate motions coupled with the space-time evolution of stresses...
This Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's Geosciences Program (CFDA 47.050) will provide $311,914 to Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University (Virginia Tech) to conduct collaborative research on advances in African crust and upper mantle dynamics from seismology, geodesy, and geodynamics. The goal is to improve understanding of plate tectonics and the Earth's dynamic interior by investigating how the African continent interacts with the underlying convecting...
This National Science Foundation (NSF) Geosciences (CFDA 47.050) Project Grant award to the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology (New Mexico Tech) is funding the development of new computational methods to simulate and advance the understanding of the dynamic interplay between Earth's surface and interior processes. The $123,880 award, running from September 1, 2024 through August 31, 2028, will couple two widely used open-source community software packages - ASPECT and LANDLAB - to...
This $175,000 Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's Geosciences Program (CFDA 47.050) supports research to develop an AI model for understanding fault dynamics and earthquake hazards in complex fault networks. The project, led by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), aims to build a multiphysics fault network model to discover reduced-order governing equations for the evolution of stress in fault systems. This work will enable improved assessment of regional...
This National Science Foundation (NSF) Geosciences Program (CFDA 47.050) Project Grant award in the amount of $317,272 will fund the development of new computational methods to simulate and advance the understanding of the dynamic interplay between the Earth's surface and interior processes. The principal awardee, the University of Colorado, will couple two widely used community codes - ASPECT (originally for simulating mantle dynamics) and LANDLAB (for modeling surface processes) - to enable...
This five-year, $475,451 National Science Foundation project grant in the Geosciences program (CFDA 47.050) will support research examining how topography preserves details of the seismic cycle. The principal investigator will develop computational landscape simulations under varying tectonic and climatic conditions to identify topographic signatures of the seismic cycle. They will then assess whether these signatures are recognizable in natural landscapes with independent constraints on seismic...
This Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's Geosciences Program (CFDA 47.050) provides $462,400 to the University of California San Diego, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, to develop advanced machine learning techniques for generating realistic, synthetic earthquake ground motion simulations. The goal is to create a faster, more generalizable physics-based model that can efficiently study large, infrequent earthquakes and assess their hazards for California and Nevada....
This $228,331 National Science Foundation project grant supports collaborative research to understand the evolution of continental lithosphere beneath New England through geologic time. Funded under the Geosciences program (CFDA 47.050), the research team will employ seismic imaging techniques and analyze geologic structures exposed at the surface to illuminate plate tectonic processes that have shaped the region. Specifically, the investigators from the University of Vermont and partner...
This $378,188 Project Grant was awarded by the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Geosciences Program (CFDA 47.050) to the Washington University in St. Louis. The award will fund collaborative research to investigate the role of mantle rock composition in the development of plate tectonics on Earth and other rocky planets. Key research activities include: Conducting rock deformation experiments to assess how the relative proportions and strength contrast between dominant mantle mineral phases...
This $499,286 Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's Geosciences program (CFDA 47.050) supports research to reconstruct the pattern, timing, and magnitude of past earthquakes and tsunamis along the Alaska-Aleutian subduction zone over the last 2,000 years. The researchers at Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University will employ innovative paleogeodetic methods and tsunami simulations to quantify vertical deformation and map the spatial distribution of tsunami...
This Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's Geosciences Program (CFDA 47.050) is funding a collaborative research effort to bridge the gap between short-term earthquake dynamics and long-term plate tectonic processes. The $205,000 award to Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University will develop advanced computational methods to efficiently model the coupled physics of great earthquakes and plate tectonics on the largest supercomputers. The project aims to provide a deeper understanding of the underlying geophysical connections that link these seismic events to plate tectonic movements, which are major drivers of natural hazards. The research team will expand the concept of adaptive discretization to create "solver adaptivity" algorithms that can effectively scale on future leadership-class computing facilities. The software developed, called RHEA, will be distributed openly to the broader scientific community. This interdisciplinary effort involves mathematicians, geophysicists, and mechanical engineers to advance the state-of-the-art in multi-physics modeling and simulations relevant to understanding plate tectonic processes and earthquake occurrence.