Volumetric Visualization of the Convection-generated Stresses in Earth

The fundamental problem of the deformation of the Earth involves stress conditions on the basis of the crust caused by the mantle convection. Based on decades of satellite gravity data, a harmonic analytical model of the convection flow has been developed at GSFC. The magnitudes and directions of the resultant stresses in the crust were obtained at 64,000 grid points for each of 18 layers from 150 km to 600 km under the Earth. In this project, we explored three dimensional volumetric visualization methods for the data. To overcome the typical volumetric visualization obstacles such as enormous amount of data and opacity of objects in the scene, we developed an interactive and transparent isosurface model to render the volumetric data. a) Animated isosurfaces of earth stress below Hawaii. The blue objects indicate the shape of the stress distribution and the yellow objects indicate the high stress areas. b) Interactive global earth stress. To view the model, please use the QuickTime Player (similarly, please select the QuickTime version of the movie). Hold the left button and drag the mouse horizontally to view areas on the earth at the same depth. Hold the left button and drag the mouse vertically to view the different layers of the stress distributions inside the earth, between 150 km to 600 km deep.