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Research Highlight
Improving seismic hazard estimates with ground-motion simulations
On 28 March 2025, a magnitude 7.7 earthquake occurred near Mandalay, Burma (Myanmar), rupturing over 460 km of the Sagaing fault and reaching supershear rupture speeds exceeding the local shear wave speed at the depth of rupture (USGS Finite Fault Model). Supershear ruptures amplify ground shaking at large distances from the ruptured fault, which are further modified by heterogeneous Earth structure to produce complex patterns of ground shaking across continental scales. Preliminary ground-motion simulations underway at the USGS aim to incorporate a growing body of seismological observations to understand the roles of source, path, and site effects contributing to observed ground shaking during the 2025 Mandalay earthquake, including amplified ground motions felt in Bangkok, Thailand, over 1,000 km away from the earthquake hypocenter. We use the rapidly published USGS finite fault model, ... [full article]
contributed by:
H.L. Kehoe1, O.S. Boyd1, A.M. Dunham2, E. Bozdağ3,4, M.P. Moschetti1, E.A. Wirth2, and W.J. Stephenson1
1U.S. Geological Survey, Geologic Hazards Science Center, Golden, CO, USA;
2U.S. Geological Survey, Earthquake Science Center, Seattle, WA, USA;
3Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Colorado School of Mines, Golden, CO, USA;
4Department of Geophysics, Colorado School of Mines, Golden, CO, USA
From HQ
Spring is a time of change. More so this year as we are witnessing a change in the federal funding landscape. Currently, CIG is operating under Year 3 funds from NSF through January 31, 2026. Receiving our funding earlier this year ensured that we could continue to offer our full slate of events as well as our community meeting this August 4-7 in Breckenridge, Colorado (see below).
Our last community was held virtually during the pandemic in 2020. However, nothing substitutes for in-person meetings. I have benefited from attending the smaller events we host every summer, meeting the newest members of our research community and learning about their research interests. CIG TNG is your opportunity to connect with this next generation of researchers without all the distractions that occur at larger meetings. We invite you to share your science through oral and poster presentations on one of the themes of the meeting or topics in geodynamics. Meeting rooms have been set aside for participant-driven discussions so come ready to pitch your topic to engage and collaborate with the community in this "unconference" format! We hope you come away energized and enthusiastic to begin holding regular community-wide meetings.
Changes at HQ this spring include welcoming Dr. Yimin Jin to the UC Davis Campus. Yimin brings expertise in numerical methods for inelastic and elastic problems and application of GPU-based acceleration techniques in computational geodynamics. During his postdoc, he will contribute to feature and algorithm development and improvements in ASPECT.
On behalf of Louis Moresi and I, the Staff at HQ - Arushi, Jarett, and Yimin; and the CIG TNG Organizing Committee, we look forward to seeing you soon in Colorado!
Lorraine Hwang, Co Director
News
deal.II Wins 2025 SIAM Award
The SIAM/ACM Prize in Computational Science and Engineering is awarded every two years by SIAM and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in the area of computational science to one individual or a group of individuals in recognition of outstanding contributions to the development and use of mathematical and computational tools and methods for the solution of science and engineering problems.
This year, the 2025 SIAM/ACM Prize in Computational Science and Engineering is awarded to the Principal Authors of the deal.II Project for their highly impactful library supporting finite element calculations. The software achieved a very high standard of software quality and modularity by providing packaged algorithms and data structures in a comprehensive and well-documented manner that enables and elevates whole communities to achieve more computationally advanced models than they could otherwise. Past prize-winning projects include PETSc and SUNDIALS.
Many of you may remember that ASPECT is a descendant of "step 32" in the deal.II library. Amongst the principal developers awarded are ASPECT principal developers Wolfgang Bangerth, Rene Gassmoeller and Timo Heister. Congratulations to all of the Principal Authors of the deal.II Project: Daniel Arndt, Wolfgang Bangerth, Bruno Blais, Marc Fehling, Rene Gassmoeller, Timo Heister, Luca Heltai, Guido Kanschat, Martin Kronbichler, Matthias Maier, Peter Munch, Jean-Paul Pelteret, BrunoTurcksin, & David Wells.
Governance
Speaker Series
Join us in congratulating our 2025-2026 CIG Distinguished Speakers:
Apply to Host a Speaker
The CIG Speaker Series seeks to promote computational modeling in geodynamics and related Earth science disciplines. The series aims to bring computational geodynamics speakers to institutions that may not otherwise have access to speakers with expertise in computational science or computational geophysics. By doing so, we aim to connect speakers and CIG with audiences from a variety of STEM domains, and to broaden participation in CIG and computational geodynamics. Institutions interested in hosting a Speaker in 2025-2026 should apply by August 31, 2025.
See the website for more information.Working Groups
CIG seeks to engage its community and encourage new ideas by seeking members interested in participating as a member of a current working Group or starting a new Focused Working Groups (FWG). New FWG's should address a specific topic and have a clearly defined scope e.g., workshop, white paper, benchmark, etc. A WG should define concrete outcome(s) achievable within a short time frame, < 2 years. Anyone can propose one! We look forward to your ideas in continuing the CIG community's dynamic leadership in the Earth sciences. [apply]Events
2025 CIG The Next Generation
2025 CIG TNG is your opportunity to engage with the geodynamics community in a small workshop setting in the beautiful mountain town of Breckenridge, Colorado, from August 4-7, 2025. Join us to discuss cross-cutting science and the next generation vision towards the understanding of large and small-scale Earth systems as we explore themes in Computational Geodynamics and Society, Space, the Machine, Community, Scales, and Hardware.
Visit the meeting website to see our exciting lineup of speakers. Submit your abstract by June 15 to be considered for an oral presentation. If you are curious about a code or looking for a new modeling tool, take a tutorial featuring community codes ASPECT, PyLith, Rayleigh, and the SPECFEM family, including the new SPECFEM++. Or you can learn more about best practices in open source software by taking the tutorial Crafting Quality Software. You can join the discussion through breakouts or better yet, help drive the discussion through "Unconference" breakouts where you can propose your own session and engage other attendees to share their ideas.
Travel support is available for early career participants when submitting an abstract. Please inquire if you are under travel restrictions.
More information about this event can be found on our website.
Deadlines:
CIG Webinars
Join us for our last webinar in our series on Visualization in Geodynamics on May 8, 2025 featuring Akira Kageyama,, Kobe University, Japan for his talk on Tetrahedral MHD dynamo model. This talk will be held at 4P PDT. [register]
See our full webinar schedule here.
Workshops and Meetings
2025| June 1-7 | PyLith Hackathon, Golden Colorado |
| June 9-20 | ASPECT Hackathon, Garden City, Utah |
| August 4-7 | CIG The Next Generation, Breckenridge, Colorado |
| tbd | Rayleigh Hackathon |