Project Spotlight: CarboKitten.jl
An open source toolkit for carbonate stratigraphic modeling
Coral reefs and limestones hold crucial records of Earth’s climate history. But gaps in the fossil record may affect our inference on the natural succession of the species found in limestone strata. Scientists have lacked accessible tools to simulate how these systems form over thousands to millions of years. The main task for eScience Center Research Software Engineers (RSEs) in this project was to develop a forward model that generates sequences representing the strata in said limestone by three different processes:
- external forcing by long term fluctuations in the Earth and Moon orbits (known as Milankovich cycles),
- natural changes in sedimentation rates due to marine ecology, and
- autogenic processes driven by the physics of sediment transport (autocyclicity).
To this end, eScience Center RSE’s Hanno Spreeuw and Johan Hidding developed the software, CarboKitten, a reimplementation of the Peter Burgess’ CarboCAT in Julia. CarboKitten models how tropical sediments and associated organisms grow under changing sea levels and environmental conditions. This free and open-source programme runs fast on standard computers and can test scientific theories about how these geological features preserve the Earth’s history.
This software was developed for the MindTheGap project. This is the first project for the eScience Center where new software was developed entirely in the Julia programming language. The expertise gained in this project has resulted in the development of new lesson material on the effective use of Julia. This way, the eScience Center experience is immediately disseminated to the larger RSE community.
Read the full article: CarboKitten.jl – an open source toolkit for carbonate stratigraphic modeling.
RSE’s: Johan Hidding and Hanno Spreeuw.
