Portrait of Chase J. Shyu

Chase J. Shyu 徐志煌

Postdoctoral Fellow in Geodynamics
Institute for Geophysics, The University of Texas at Austin

I build numerical models of how planets deform — from Taiwan's mountains to Europa's ice shell.

GitHub · GeoFLAC · Model videos · CV · Email

Research themes

Continental rifting and sedimentary basins

How do rift basins grow, fill, and heat up? I simulate the coupled evolution of faulting, sedimentation, and thermal structure during continental rifting with DynEarthSol, from fault strain partitioning to syn-rift stratigraphy.

Magma migration and volcanic rifting

3D simulation of magma migration during continental breakup — dike intrusion, oceanic crust formation, and the transition from magma-poor to volcanic rifting, applied to the Afar rift.

Europa ice shell dynamics

Two-phase flow in ice: I develop robust melt-migration algorithms under the explicit FLAC scheme to model convection in Europa's ice shell and the formation of its enigmatic chaos terrain.

Taiwan orogeny and thermochronology

Reconstructing mountain building from cooling ages: zircon fission-track thermochronology combined with thermal–mechanical modeling of the Hsuehshan Range and the Taiwan orogeny.

Model gallery

Subduction demo with MMG remeshing (600 × 200 km)

Magma-poor rifting with sediments, 3D, full 10 Myr

Europa ice shell convection (50 × 50 × 30 km, 67 kyr)

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Software

DynEarthSol — core developer

An efficient explicit Lagrangian finite-element solver for long-term tectonics, surface processes, and earthquake-cycle dynamics (2D/3D, unstructured meshes). I develop and review its physics and lead the GPU parallelization effort.

33 merged pull requests
v2.0 GMD paper (submitted)
10 yr on the GeoFLAC team

Contribution highlights →

Selected publications

  • Shyu, C. J., Lee, S., Ding, X., Keum, J., Tan, T., Lavier, L. L., & Choi, E. (submitted). DynEarthSol v2.0: An Efficient Explicit Lagrangian Solver for Geodynamics, Surface Processes, and Earthquake-Cycle Dynamics. Geoscientific Model Development. Preprint
  • Tan, E., Lee, Y.-H., Chang, J.-B., Zheng, M.-J., & Shyu, C. J. (2024). Mountain Building Process of the Taiwan Orogeny. Science Advances. DOI
  • Shyu, C. J., Tan, E., Kirstein, L. A., Stuart, F. M., & Chen, Y.-G. (2023). The exhumation history of the middle Hsuehshan Range, Taiwan, as revealed by zircon thermochronological modeling. Tectonophysics, 860, 229907. DOI

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