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A Surface-in-cell Approach to Including Evolving Faults in Geodynamic Models

Description: 

Faults play a major role in the dynamic evolution of the crust and mantle. They focus deformation at a spatial and temporal scale that is significantly finer than the large-scale tectonic timescale and it is usually necessary to have a distinct numerical strategy to include them in a geodynamic model.

A classical strategy is to create a mesh that respects the fault locations and attribute fault properties (or additional degrees of freedom) to the nodes or edges of the mesh that lie on the fault. This approach has a high setup cost but it provides accurate and efficient solutions.

When faults evolve their shape or position time (for example a plate-boundary in a global convection model), a fault-conforming mesh can be overly expensive to compute.

We examine some simple alternatives to remeshing of the faults and compare their ability to accurately represent fault behaviour in large-scale models. Our preferred model is one in which fault-segments are treated as unique, triangulated surfaces which map information to their embedding mesh such as perpendicular distance, surface normal, material properties, history variables. The surfaces move through the mesh in a manner comparable to the particles of a particle-in-cell method. The properties on the mesh are smoothed, but the smoothing is not cumulative as the fault moves. The mesh can be adaptively refined close to the fault but there is no requirement for the fault surfaces / edges to be included in the mesh.

We will show benchmarks comparing this approach with fault-conforming meshes and applications to tectonic deformation and fluid flow problems.

Session: Linking Subduction Zone Processes and Cascading Hazards in Alaska, Cascadia, Chile and Beyond [Poster]

Type: Poster

Date: 4/16/2026

Presentation Time: 08:00 AM (local time)

Presenting Author: Louis Moresi

Student Presenter: No

Invited Presentation: 

Poster Number: 129

Authors