Thorsten Becker - Associate Professor of Earth Sciences: Research and teaching visualizations

THORSTEN W. BECKER
Department of Earth Sciences
University of Southern California
Los Angeles

Visualizations

Reconstructed seafloor age and continental drift from Müller et al. (2008)
Animations of Müller et al.'s (2008) seafloor age reconstructions, which are consistent with the heat flow variability estimates from Loyd et al. (2007).
Global tectonic maps
3-D thermal convection

bottom heated internally heated

Snapshots from 3-D, spherical thermal convection computed using Citcom by Zhong et al. (2000). Plots show hot (red) and cold (blue) temperature anomaly isosurfaces.
2-D thermal convection animations
Animation of spherical harmonics
Hardebeck & Shearer (2004) HASH focal mechanism map for southern California (8MB PDF)
Most recent PBO GPS velocity solution
USC is part of the UNAVCO consortium which runs the Plate Boundary Observatory (PBO) component of the NSF Earthscope program. The map below shows the most recent GPS solutions from PBO for western North America in a stable North America reference frame.

For the most recent plot, click here: [PNG] [PDF]. To track how stations come online and solution quality improves, you might also want to check out the [PBO GPS data movie], the [interpolated PBO GPS data movie], or the [PBO GPS Plot Archive].