2012 Workshop on Crustal Deformation Modeling
Workshop Summary
The 2012 Crustal Deformation Modeling workshop was held June 18-22 on the campus of Colorado School of Mines in Golden, CO. This meeting continued an ongoing series of workshops held over the past 10 years. The focus of these workshops is physically based models of the distribution of lithospheric stress in space and time via simulation of the strain accumulation, dynamic rupture propagation, and postseismic relaxation over multiple earthquake cycles. The workshop included participation from 62 scientists. As in previous workshops in this series, nearly two-thirds of the participants were graduate students and postdocs. In this workshop 44% of the participants were graduate students, 21% were postdocs, 18% were faculty, and 18% were researchers. About 80% of the attendees participated in both the tutorials on the first two days of the workshop (Monday and Tuesday) and the science talks and discussions over the following two and one-half days (Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday).
The tutorials focused on Relax and PyLith with some discussion of CUBIT for meshing and ParaView for visualization. The 11 science talks covered a range of topics associated with modeling earthquake deformation, including the role of geodetic modeling in the Uniform California Earthquake Rupture Forecast (UCERF3), elastic block modeling, Bayesian inversion methods, onceptual models of slow slip, the rheology of the lower crust with constraints on crust-mantle interactions, and insights from critical taper analysis on earthquake cycle modeling. The workshop also included two discussion sessions with one focused on the need for an inversion framework and one focused on prioritizing features to be included in PyLith. The participants expressed strong support for a community kinematic inversion code using a highly modular approach. Such a code would target the geodetic modeling community but might support seismic data as well. The main obstacle is finding the appropriate scientist to lead/champion the code development effort. The two hot topics for PyLith development were multiphysics capabilities and earthquake cycle modeling.