The Effects of Temperature Dependent Conductivity on Basin Scale Heat flow

Abstract

We present a methodology for calibrating numerical models of deep crustal heat flow, which incorporate structural information at the thousand-kilometer scale whilst maintaining a quantification of uncertainty. Geological structural interpretations are increasingly the product of geological and geophysical inversion methods, and include some quantification of the propagation of uncertainty through the modeling process to the output. A problem arises in the scale of computation needed to meet these requirements, which can quickly saturate computational resources readily available. In this paper we show an intuitive example of the use of forward models to analyse the effect of variation in a single aspect of a model parameterization: the non-linearity resulting from temperature dependence of thermal diffusivity. Our starting point is the Sydney-Gunnedah basin. In the context of basin geometry, how sensitive is the model response to variations in temperature dependent conductivity?