Multimedia Gallery
Modeling Earth's Enigmatic Core
This graphic was taken from a spectral-element application called SPECFEM3D_GLOBE that uses a fine mesh of hexahedral finite elements, pictured here, and high-performance computers to help seismologists learn more about the inner sanctum of the Earth's core. Somewhat like the way a CAT scan images the brain, seismologists use the application to track seismic wave patterns from earthquakes to model the structure of the earths core. One of the great challenges is to capture the propagation of high-frequency waves, with periods of 1 to 2 seconds, as they travel across the globe.
This research was performed by a team led by researchers at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego that has successfully completed record-setting, petascale-level simulations of the Earth's inner structure, paving the way for seismologists to model seismic wave propagations at frequencies of just over one second--the same frequencies that occur in nature. The team's research is crucial in helping seismologists better understand the dramatic differences in the complex structure of the Earth's inner core, which appears to be anisotropic, or having unequal physical properties along different axes, with dramatic differences between its Eastern and Western Hemispheres.
For more information about this research, see the UC-San Diego news story, "SDSC-Led Team Sets Records in Simulating Seismic Wave Propagation Across the Earth".
[Research for the SPECFEM3D_GLOBE applications was supported in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF); the Performance Engineering Research Institute (PERI); and the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE); in addition to resources from the NSF-funded TeraGrid program.] (Date of Image: 2008)
Credit: D. Komatitsch, Université de Pau; L. Carrington, San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego
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