People naturally focus on big news and Geo-scientists also pay more attentions to big earthquakes happening in plate boundaries rather than the 'boring' small earthquakes in stable continents. Does this mean the intraplate earthquakes are negligible in scientific research?

Issues with intra-element discontinuities in PIC-FEM The classical finite element method (FEM) has been widely used to simulate diverse problems in engineering. Unlike most engineering problems, geological simulations are dominated by emergence of geometrical structures due to the non-linear processes involved.

Haibin Yang, Louis Moresi and Mark Quigley provide a scaling relationship for the fault spacing in continental strike-slip shear zones.

Katie Cooper, Rebecca Farrington and Meghan Miller explain how cratonic lithosphere can be sculpted by flow from a passing subducting slab.

Figure: Photographed on Kangaroo Island, this rock – called a ‘zebra schist’ – deformed from flat-lying marine sediments through being stressed by a continental collision over 500 million years ago. Dietmar Muller CC BY Dietmar Müller, University of Sydney ; Maria Seton, University of Sydney , and Sabin Zahirovic, University of Sydney Classical plate tectonic theory was developed in the 1960s.

Though giant earthquakes are disastrous, they provide essential information to investigate earthquake physics. Thyagarajulu Gollapalli, a PhD student jointly from Monash University and the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, discusses our present understanding of such big earthquakes.

Meghan S. Miller, Australian National University and Louis Moresi, Australian National University Our responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have dramatically changed human activity all over the world. People are working from home, schools are closed in many places, travel is restricted, and in some cases only essential shops and businesses are open. Scientists see signs of these changes wherever they look.

The Underworld team would like to congratulate Bénédicte Cenki-Tok and co-authors at the University of Sydney and the University of Montpellier on their recent publication, B. Cenki-Tok, P.F. Rey, D. Arcay;

Viscoelastic materials exhibit the properies of both solids and liquids, with deformation rates dependent on both the viscous stress and elastic stress rate.

Making your research reproducible means that you provide the entire workflow from data, through software and post-processing freely available. Not only can somebody repeat your experiments and verify them, they can build upon them. In lab-based disciplines, there are many further challenges, but in research that is predominantly based on data processing, this ought to be an achievable goal.