Numerical Studies on Coupled Stokes-Transport Systems for Mantle Convection

Accurate retrodictions of the past evolution of convection in the Earth’s mantle are crucial to obtain a qualitative understanding of this central mechanism behind impactful geological events on our planet. They require highly resolved simulations and therefore extremely scalable numerical methods. This paper applies the massively parallel matrix-free finite element framework HyTeG to approximate solutions to stationary Stokes systems and time-dependent, coupled convection problems. It summarizes the underlying mathematical model and verifies the implementation through semi-analytical setups and community benchmarks. The numerical results agree with the expected outcomes from the literature.