Thermo-Chemical Mantle Convection Simulations Using Gaia

Abstract

Thermally and chemically driven buoyancy in planetary mantles cause the slow creep of material, which is ultimately responsible for the heat transport from the deep interior and the large-scale dynamics inside the Earth and other terrestrial planets. With the increasing computational power and the improvement of numerical methods, numerical simulations of planetary interiors have become one the principal tools for understanding the processes active during the thermo-chemical evolution of a terrestrial planet considering constraints posed by geological and geochemical surface observations delivered by various planetary missions. In the present work we present technical aspects and applications to solid-state mantle convection using our code Gaia in Cartesian/cylindrical/spherical geometry. We test the convergence of several numerical solvers that have been implemented in our code, and show the code performance on the HLRS System with up to 10,000 cores. Further we compare our results with published benchmark values.