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Workshops

G-ADOPT Workshop 2025

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The 2025 G-ADOPT workshop will be held at the ANU's Research School of Earth Sciences in Canberra. Mark your diaries for Tuesday 18/11/25 (9.30 am – 5.30 pm), with a workshop dinner that evening. We welcome all participants, including existing and prospective users, developers, and collaborators.

The workshop will provide an opportunity for the G-ADOPT team to showcase recent development and advances in both the forward and adjoint components of this finite-element modelling platform. Areas of focus will include the following topics, with the level of detail and time dedicated to each tailored to the background and interests of registered participants.

  1. Mantle and lithosphere dynamics;
  2. Glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) and visco-elasticity;
  3. Groundwater modelling;
  4. New functionality: (i) mesh adaptivity; (ii) multi-material simulations;

Thanks to generous support from our partners at AuScope, this workshop will be free for all students, provided registration is completed before the early-bird registration deadline of 31/07/2025. Student registrations after this date require a contribution of A$30. Registration for other participants will be A$30 prior to the early-bird registration deadline and A$60 thereafter.

🕘 Schedule (Tentative)

Time Session
09:30 – 10:15 Welcome & Overview: Introduction and overview of G-ADOPT
10:15 – 10:45 Scientific Showcase: Mantle and lithosphere dynamics
10:45 – 11:15 Break
11:15 – 11:45 Scientific Showcase: Glacial isostatic adjustment
11:45 – 12:00 Scientific Showcase: Groundwater simulation
12:00 – 13:00 Lunch
13:00 – 14:15 Tutorial 1 (Base Case): Parallel sessions — mantle/lithosphere dynamics or GIA
14:15 – 14:30 Break
14:30 – 15:30 Tutorial 2 (Adjoint Case): Parallel sessions — mantle/lithosphere dynamics or GIA
15:30 – 15:45 Break
15:45 – 16:30 Tutorial 3: Mesh adaptivity
16:30 – 17:15 Tutorial 4: Multi-material simulations
17:15 – 17:30 Wrap-Up Discussion
18:30 → Workshop Dinner 🍽️

🧩 Notes

  • The morning session will feature short talks, demonstrations, and open discussion.
  • In the afternoon, we’ll switch to hands-on tutorials — running in parallel for mantle/lithosphere dynamics and GIA — before wrapping up with sessions on new functionality.
  • Bring a laptop if you’d like to follow along with the practicals.
  • Tutorials will be run on Google Colab, so please make sure you have a Google account set up beforehand.
  • To visualise results, please install ParaView ahead of time.

GIA Workshop 2025

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The G-ADOPT team will be holding a workshop focused on Glacial Isostatic Adjustment (GIA) in Hobart, Tasmania on Tuesday 04/11/25. We welcome all participants, including existing and prospective users, developers, and collaborators.

The location will be the the TEAL seminar room 136, Centenary Building, Sandy Bay Campus. See here for a map link.

A tentative schedule is included below. Note the workshop will take place the day before the ACEAS conference in Hobart.

🕘 Schedule (Tentative)

Time Session
09:30 – 10:15 Welcome & Introduction — Overview of GIA modelling in G-ADOPT.
10:15 – 12:15 Tutorial 1: Base case setup (includes coffee break).
12:15 – 13:15 Lunch.
13:15 – 13:30 Tutorial 2: Annulus demo (fly through) — visualising checkpointed states in ParaView (no code run).
13:30 – 14:00 Primer – Adjoint Theory — Key concepts and intuition.
14:00 – 15:30 Tutorial 3: Adjoint inversion — recovering unknown viscosity structure.
15:30 – 15:45 Break.
15:45 – 16:45 Participant Challenge: Exploring sensitivity of viscosity estimates to ice-sheet size using adjoint kernels.
16:45 – 17:00 Wrap-Up Discussion.
17:00 → Pub! 🍻

🧩 Notes

  • Bring a laptop if you’d like to follow along with the practicals.
  • Tutorials will be run on Google Colab, so please make sure you have a Google account set up beforehand.
  • To visualise results, please install ParaView ahead of time.

G-ADOPT Presentations and Tutorials — March–May 2025

2025 Sydney

Sydney, Earthbyte group — 28 March 2025 Rhodri Davies and Sia Ghelichkhan visited the Earthbyte group at the University of Sydney. They presented recent developments targetting global geodynamical models and their interaction with plate-reconstruction frameworks, via GPlates and its PyGPlates Python interface. A particular focus of this workshop was model output, with an emphasis on the tools available to post-process and interrogate global 3-D spherical models.

Munich, LMU — 06 May 2025 Sia Ghelichkhan visited the Computational Geodynamics group at LMU Munich and provided an overview of recent progress on the G-ADOPT platform. The visit included discussions on potential collaborations across multiple fronts, including adjoint methods and links to mineral physics models, with an emphasis on expanding the platform's applicability to broader geodynamic research.

Paris, IPGP — 09 May 2025 Thomas Duvernay visited IPGP and gave an overview of Firedrake and G-ADOPT to institute members. The presentation included an introduction with hands-on examples of Firedrake-based simulations alongside a discussion and overview of recent G-ADOPT developments. The objective was to provide an as-complete-as-possible first look of Firedrake and G-ADOPT to potential new users.

Zurich, ETH — 10 May 2025 Sia Ghelichkhan visited the Seismology and Wave Physics group at ETH Zurich to present the initial results from the GeoDynamic Preliminary Reference Earth Model (G-PREM), developed using the REVEAL workflow. The visit provided an opportunity to gather feedback and discuss future integration of seismic and geodynamic data in joint modelling efforts.

G-ADOPT Workshop 2024

2024 G-ADOPT 2024 G-ADOPT 2024 G-ADOPT

The 2024 AuScope supported G-ADOPT workshop was held at the ANU's Kioloa Coastal Campus on the New South Wales coast (10/11/24 - 12/11/24).

The workshop provided background to the platform and training for potential users, facilitating community growth. We welcomed national and international participants. Key areas of focus included:

  1. Mantle and lithosphere dynamics;
  2. Glacial isostatic adjustment and visco-elasticity;
  3. Multi-material simulations;
  4. Adjoint-based optimisation problems.

G-ADOPT Workshop -- Sete, France, September 2024

2024 Sete

The G-ADOPT team ran its first international workshop, as a part of the 2024 Ada Lovelace workshop on Modelling Mantle and Lithosphere Dynamics, in Sete, France. A number of tutorials were covered, ranging from idealised forward models, to adjoint-based inversions. The workshop was attended by over 30 participants.

G-ADOPT Workshop 2023

2023 Workshop 2023 Workshop Tutorial 2023 Workshop Dinner

The 2023 G-ADOPT workshop was held on 14/09-15/09 at the Australian National University. This in-person workshop provided an opportunity for the G-ADOPT team to showcase recent progress on the forward and adjoint components of this finite element modelling platform, using the Firedrake and dolfin-adjoint frameworks.

G-ADOPT Workshop 2022

2022 Workshop 2022 Workshop Tutorial 2022 Workshop Dinner

The first G-ADOPT workshop was held on 28/04/22-29/04/22 at the Australian National University. This workshop provided an opportunity for the G-ADOPT development team to showcase progress on the forward modelling component of our platform, using the Firedrake framework. The overarching goal of the workshop was to provide a background to the platform and training for potential users, thus facilitating community growth within Australia. Although our focus was on geodynamical application, we also identified other research areas for future applicability. There was an opportunity for interested practitioners to engage with developers and other participants to ascertain whether their problems are tractable within Firedrake.