2025-11-29
I worked with my friends and colleagues Charitra Jain, Diogo Lourenço, Antoine Rozel, and Paul Tackley in the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Group at ETH Zurich to provide a simulation for use in Jennifer Walshe and Timothy Morton's 2019 "TIME TIME TIME".
The simulation was a 2 dimensional simulation of the evolution of an Earth-like planet over several billion years. This time scale, on the same order as the age of the universe, is the longest time scale we (so far) relate to a as humans, and the simulation appears near the beginning and end of the piece, corresponding to the longest timescale there, as well.
To make it, we used Paul Tackley's StagYY code to simulate a "beautiful imagined cross section of the Earth", using parameters allowing for chemical evolution of rocks leading to self-consistent evolution of crust and a subduction-like recycling of this back into the mantle. These are related to simulations as featured in studies by Jain et al. (2019) and Rozel et al. (2019) .
The technical challenge was generating and combining vastly more frames than necessary for the main scientific purpose of the code, allowing us to generate a video over an hour long at a reasonable frame rate. This was achieved (as I remember) with some careful batched use of Paraview on the Euler cluster at ETH Zurich.A video of one of the performances: