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I would love it, but no one has quite managed it yet! There are simulations of, e.g., plate motions, but even those get quite uncertain if you go back more than
by cbkeller 5y ago
I would love it, but no one has quite managed it yet! There are simulations of, e.g., plate motions, but even those get quite uncertain if you go back more than about a billion years.
Forward models of the flow of the atmosphere, oceans, or even the mantle all exist, but with harsh tradeoffs between resolution and how much geologic time you can simulate. For this reason, we have coupled atmosphere-ocean models, but not really atmosphere-ocean-mantle models (because the timescale of mantle convection is just too much slower than the other two). I would really love to see more integrated whole-earth-system modelling, and that's probably something I'll try to work on in the future, but we may have a long way to go!
- morphle 5y agoThe way to integrate all these simulations at different time and spatial scales and different models would be at a meta-model or (lack of a better word) meta-simulation level. That is what I propose. It would allow your future research to retrofit in the partial simulations we have today. I think it requires cross-disciplinary collaboration between my kind of 'computer science' with mostly geologists, paleontologist and a few planetairy scientists, cosmologists and evolutionairy biologists. Maybe documentairies like Cosmos would fund part of it for they also make many such animations.