New papers – early 2018

The paper of Marie Bocher on a data assimilation method to reconstruct mantle convection and tectonics jointly is out in Nonlinear Processes in Geophysics. You can download it here: Bocheretal2018. It presents the application of the Ensemble Kalman Filter methodology for the mantle convection problem, in which plate motions are not prescribed but a data to match. Marie developped a method often used for oceanography and weather prediction. Alexandre Fournier, a co-author here, used it to study the evolution of the geomagnetic field. Marie is now postdoc in ETH Zurich.

The paper of Nicolas Coltice and Grace Shephard (Oslo) on making tectonic predictions from global mantle convection models. They show that starting from a guessed initial conditions, the predicted tectonics for the Earth can be very good initially and diverge rapidly. The causes of these errors in these models are more coming from initial conditions than rheology unknowns. Therefore, the method described in Marie Bocher’s paper above could be used to solve the problem. The paper can be downloaded here: colticeshephard2018.