Introduction and benchmarking The convection of the Earth’s mantle is usually modelled as an incompressible process, referred to as the Boussinesq approximation. However, in the Earth’s mantle, the pressure increase associated with depth also increases the density due to self-compression (King et al. 2010). In some applications, this compressibility may be non-negligible and modelling it may be desirable.

Hands-on experiments explore the details of thermochemical convection. Build your own Lava Lamp and learn why the continents don't get sucked down into the deep Earth.

Buoyant material rising in the Earth's mantle is expected to spread out when it reaches the base of a tectonic plate like pancake batter dropped into a pan.

Mantle plumes are the best explanation we have for much of Earth's intraplate volcanism but some remain doubtful despite 50 years of rigorous testing.

In Eastern Asia, Jurassic and Cretaceous intraplate volcanism and magmatism differ in their spatial distribution and composition. A combination of plate kinematic and geodynamic models provides clues for their causes.

The largest earthquakes occur at subduction zones, where one plate descends beneath another into the underlying mantle, at a convergent plate boundary. Some subduction zones seem to host more large earthquakes than others (Fig. 1), potentially reflecting the influence of large-scale geodynamic processes, which vary from one subduction zone to the next.

This is a transcript of a podcast with Oliver Strimpel from GeologyBites. We chat about the challenges and benefits of reconstructing Earth evolution over a billion years.

Eastern Australia hosts a wide range of volcanic edifices, ranging from localised outcrops to lava fields and central volcanoes (Figure 1). In general, the older volcanics are in the north with distinct tracks of decreasing age to the south (see Figure 1 and, e.g., Davies et al., 2015). Similar age profiles are seen for two lines of seamounts through the Tasman Sea (e.g., Seton et al., 2019). This pattern of age progression reflects the rapid

Integration of passive seismic images, geochemistry, and reconstruction of uplift from river profiles provide new findings on arc-continent collisional processes

Continents host the oldest building blocks of the Earth's surface and keep a record of the processes that shaped it. A careful reading and high-performance computational modelling of the early, hotter Earth reveal a coming of age story.