There, Baumgardner can watch the planet take shape through sometimes violent forces and search for ways of predicting the earthquakes that still strike today. For most of the century, however, there has been a disconnect between the geophysicists studying these processes and the geologists studying the detailed features in the rocks. The dilemma hinges on an inability to get very far inside the planet to watch even the present-day motions. The deepest drill hole, for instance, reaches merely eight miles down. A supercomputer, by contrast, can drill all the way through at several million points simultaneously.
Mathematical equations represent the physics along the drill holes.
Following changes over time, supercomputer simulations provide a fast-forward version of the evolving Earth to check against and fill out the hazy picture painted by observations. Three years ago, he joined a NASA-funded research team boring through the Earth with simulation. A patchwork of plates Most responsible for surface geology are tectonic plates. Plate movements carried the continents to their present-day positions. They split what is now New Mexico, dragging up hot mantle material in a volcanic eruption 500 times larger than that of Mount St. Helens.