Visualizing Strain Anisotropy in Mantle Flow Fields

The evolution of strain and development of material anisotropy in models of Earth’s mantle flow convey important information about how to interpret the geometric relationship between observation of seismic anisotropy and the actual mantle flow field. By combining feature extraction techniques such as path line integration and tensor accumulation, we compute time-varying strain vector fields that build the foundation for a number of feature extraction and visualization techniques. The proposed field segmentation, clustering, histograms, and multi-volume visualization techniques facilitate an intuitive understanding of three-dimensional strain in such flow fields, overcoming limitations of previous methods such as 2D line plots and slicing. We present applications of our approach to an artificial time varying flow data set and a real world example of stationary flow in a subduction zone and discuss the challenges of processing these geophysical data sets as well as the insights gained.