Mantle convection modeling with viscoelastic/brittle lithosphere: Numerical and computational methodology

Louis Moresi*, David May, Justin Freeman, Bill Appelbe

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapterpeer-review

3 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

The Earth's tectonic plates are strong, viscoelastic shells which make up the outermost part of a thermally convecting, predominantly viscous layer; at the boundaries between plates the rheology is thought to be dominated by brittle processes. Brittle failure of the lithosphere occurs when stresses are high. In order to build a realistic simulation of the planet's evolution, the complete viscoelastic / brittle convection system needs to be considered. A Lagrangian Integration point finite element method is discussed which can simulate very large deformation viscoelasticity with a strain-dependent yield stress. We also describe the general, parallel implementation of this method (SNARK) and compare the performance to a highly optimized, serial prototype code (ELLIPSIS). The specialized code shows better scaling for a single processor. The parallel scaling of the general code is very flat for "realistic" problem sizes indicating efficient use of multiple processors.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
EditorsPeter M.A. Sloot, David Abramson, Alexander V. Bogdanov, Yuriy E. Gorbachev, Jack J. Dongarra, Albert Y. Zomaya
PublisherSpringer Verlag
Pages781-787
Number of pages7
ISBN (Print)9783540401964
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2003
Externally publishedYes

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume2659
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

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