Rock Exhumation Exercise

Stephen Hurst
University of Illinois
Department of Geology
1301 W Green St.
Urbana, Il 61801
shurst@illinois.edu

An exercise to build a one-dimensional STELLA model of heat flow during rock uplift and exhumation. The model exemplifies the Laplacian world view which simplifies this model immensely. difficulties in building the model are typically related to boundary conditions, time steps, and correct use of units.

Goals are to see how a change of view can simplify modeling, how to analyse graphs and see how feedbacks create a non-linear system.

This is part of a sequence of weekly models, so students know that they are expected to create models in the class. They may finish them outside of class and write up the results and interpretations.

Lecture
Generally a short recap on heat flow and the various parts of the equation that describe it is in order. In particular, how we can ignore the advection term of the equation by having our viewpoint move with the moving mass. Probably one must also note how the differential equation transfers to the finite differences and time steps used in the STELLA model. A warning about the boundary values is in order also (divide by zero problems and small time steps cause problems sometimes).