Volumetric Visualization of Convection Stresses in Earth

  • Credit

    NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

Volumetric Visualization of the Convection-generated Stresses in Earth

The fundamental problem of the deformation of the Earth involves stress conditions on the basis of the crust caused by the mantle convection. Based on decades of satellite gravity data, a harmonic analytical model of the convection flow has been developed at GSFC. The magnitudes and directions of the resultant stresses in the crust were obtained at 64,000 grid points for each of 18 layers from 150 km to 600 km under the Earth. In this project, we explored three dimensional volumetric visualization methods for the data. To overcome the typical volumetric visualization obstacles such as enormous amount of data and opacity of objects in the scene, we developed an interactive and transparent isosurface model to render the volumetric data. a) Animated isosurfaces of earth stress below Hawaii. The blue objects indicate the shape of the stress distribution and the yellow objects indicate the high stress areas. b) Interactive global earth stress. To view the model, please use the QuickTime Player (similarly, please select the QuickTime version of the movie). Hold the left botton and drag the mouse horizontally to view areas on the earth at the same depth. Hold the left bottom and drag the mouse vertically to view the different layers of the stress distributions inside the earth, between 150 km to 600 km deep.

Metadata

  • Sensor

    No Satellite/SLR, TOPEX/Poseidon

  • Animation ID

    2970

  • Video ID

    None

  • Start Timecode

    00:00:00:00

  • End Timecode

    00:00:00:00

  • Animator

    Yang Cai, Horace Mitchell, Greg Shirah, Alex Kekesi, Stuart A. Snodgrass

  • Studio

    SVS

  • Visualization Date

    2004/08/03

  • Scientist

    Han-Shou Liu (NASA/GSFC), Jizhong Chen (unaffiliated)

  • Citation

    Han-Shou Liu, Ronald Kolenkiewicz, Jinling Li and Jizhong Chen, 'Satellite Detection of the Convection Generated Stresses in Earth,' Recent Research and Development in Geophysics, 5 (2003): 117-137; Han-Shou Liu, Ronald Kolenkiewicz, Jizhong Chen, Jinling Li, Yang Cai and Clarence Wade, Jr.,'Satellite Seek Gravity Signals for Probing Seismotectonic Stresses in Earth,' to be published

  • Datasets

    TRANET, EGM96

  • Keywords

    Volumetric, Earth, Stress, Gravitational, Earthquake, Deformation, Interactive visualization, Expressional visualization, Ambient intelligence, Scientific discovery

  • Animation Type

    Regular

  • Other Credits

    Patty Pun, Carnegie Mellon University and Jason Fung, Carnegie Mellon University.