@menno received a post-doc fellowship from CIG (geodynamics.org) to greatly improve the world builder in the coming months. Thanks to CIG and all the collaborators of the project, and I am sure we are going to make great progress in the next few months!

A small but important change for all world builder input files using mid oceanic ridges.

The development release now allows defining multiple ridges per feature. This does mean that input files using ridges will need to be updated to include an array around the ridge coordinates. So [[1,2],[3,4]] becomes [[[1,2],[3,4]]].

This also means that you now can define multiple ridges as [[[10,20],[20,30],[10,40]],[[50,10],[60,10]]]. For more info see: https://github.com/GeodynamicWorldBuilder/WorldBuilder/pull/362

The world builder has changed the name of the main branch from `master` to `main`.

If you are new to the world builder, you don't need to worry about this and you can just clone the repository as usual. If you already have a local cloned repository, github should show instructions on how to update your repository, or you can take a look here: https://github.com/GeodynamicWorldBuilder/WorldBuilder/issues/350#issuecomment-954315494 for instructions and more information.

Progress has been made in recent weeks. A major highlight is the addition of the mass conservative slab temperature model together with the half space cooling temperature model for the oceanic plate by Magali Billen. Another highlight is fixing slabs and faults beyond the -180 and 180 range.

A big change which I am now working on is defining the radius in spherical coordinates while keeping ensuring consistency between the world builder and the calling program (see https://github.com/GeodynamicWorldBuilder/WorldBuilder/issues/331).

I am happy to announce the release of version 0.4.0 (Cascadia) of the Geodynamic World Builder. Besides a lot of other things (see the changelog), the most notable new features of this release is the new continuous slab. This allows for much more smooth and realistic slabs to be made.

The code name Cascadia comes from the Cascadia subduction zone. Find out more at https://github.com/GeodynamicWorldBuilder/WorldBuilder/releases/tag/v0.4.0 Enjoy!

Several major improvements have been made to the world builder in the last few week.
The most important one is the new interpolation scheme which allows for continuous slabs and faults (see attached pictures). But there is also a new benchmark which continuously checks for every pull request how fast they are run compared to current master branch (Thanks to https://github.com/asayers/cbdr !). Furthermore, some initial work has been done on expanding the MPI capabilities of the world builder.

The changelog has been changed to a markdown file called CHANGELOG.md in the main directory. Take a look at it here: https://github.com/GeodynamicWorldBuilder/WorldBuilder/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md! The file was a bit hidden in the doc directory and cumbersome to read and edit. The new format is based on https://keepachangelog.com/en/1.0.0/, with the addition of some extra information for each item. Looking a the changes between versions and adding changes to the changelog should be a lot easier now!

The world builder website (https://geodynamicworldbuilder.github.io) has been updated to include the post of this Mastodon account! This will make it easier to post updates and allow the website to stay up to date with the development 🎉