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Main Authors: Maor, Ron, Hansen, Lars, Jerolmack, Douglas, Goldsby, David
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.14028
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author Maor, Ron
Hansen, Lars
Jerolmack, Douglas
Goldsby, David
author_facet Maor, Ron
Hansen, Lars
Jerolmack, Douglas
Goldsby, David
contents Rock and ice are ubiquitous geologic materials. While apparently solid, they also exhibit fluid behavior under stress - a property termed viscoelasticity. Viscoelastic convection of Earth's mantle drives tectonic plate motion with consequences for earthquakes and sea-level rise, while viscoelastic deformation of ice controls glacier flow and the flexure of icy moons. For crystalline materials, "flow laws" describing bulk rheology can be derived from understanding microstructural dynamics such as crystal-defect migration. Common geologic materials like ice and olivine have grain sizes and crystal orientations that evolve with strain; this complexity precludes a first principles approach. Here we use a Bayesian inference method to learn the connection between microstructure and flow in ice and olivine, from fits to experimental data of these materials undergoing steady-state deformation and forced oscillations. We demonstrate that this method can constrain a nonlinear viscoelastic model for each material, that is capable of capturing both steady and transient dynamics and can also predict dynamics for data it was not trained on. Our results may improve geodynamic models that rely on parameterized constitutive equations, while our approach will be useful for experimental design and hypothesis testing.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_14028
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning the nature of viscoelasticity in geologic materials with MCMC
Maor, Ron
Hansen, Lars
Jerolmack, Douglas
Goldsby, David
Geophysics
Computational Physics
Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability
Rock and ice are ubiquitous geologic materials. While apparently solid, they also exhibit fluid behavior under stress - a property termed viscoelasticity. Viscoelastic convection of Earth's mantle drives tectonic plate motion with consequences for earthquakes and sea-level rise, while viscoelastic deformation of ice controls glacier flow and the flexure of icy moons. For crystalline materials, "flow laws" describing bulk rheology can be derived from understanding microstructural dynamics such as crystal-defect migration. Common geologic materials like ice and olivine have grain sizes and crystal orientations that evolve with strain; this complexity precludes a first principles approach. Here we use a Bayesian inference method to learn the connection between microstructure and flow in ice and olivine, from fits to experimental data of these materials undergoing steady-state deformation and forced oscillations. We demonstrate that this method can constrain a nonlinear viscoelastic model for each material, that is capable of capturing both steady and transient dynamics and can also predict dynamics for data it was not trained on. Our results may improve geodynamic models that rely on parameterized constitutive equations, while our approach will be useful for experimental design and hypothesis testing.
title Learning the nature of viscoelasticity in geologic materials with MCMC
topic Geophysics
Computational Physics
Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.14028