Figure 1.

(A) The study of how the lithosphere deforms spans disciplines to help us understand earth processes on a subatomic to global scale and from microseconds to hundreds of millions of years. The wide range of scales in space and time are challenging to accommodate using today’s computation resources (after Hwang et al., 2014). (B) Mathematical techniques commonly used in geophysics research can be classified as continuum, analytical, or discontinuous methods, posing computational and numerical challenges for multidisciplinary research.