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Panta rhei, "everything flows". This famous aphorism was attributed to the Greek philosopher Heraclitus and indeed many systems in Earth Sciences are in motion ranging from sand dunes, land slides, rock or snow avalanches to sea ice, subglacial sediments, and earthquake fault gouge.
While often described by a continuum model these systems have all in common an arrangement of elementary building blocks or grains. (...) The physical laws that are used to describe this motion are often empirical - Glen law for ice sheet and glaciers dynamic, rate and state friction law in seismology - and can lack justification at the individual grain size - visco-plastic rheology of sea ice. (...) With the increase in computer power, discrete element simulations have emerged as ideal tools to address these shortcomings and validate the macroscopic continuum models by providing a microscopic view of the flow of amorphous solids. (...)
In this context the aim of the proposed workshop is to bring together a group of leading experts in the field of computational modeling of amorphous plasticity at all scales (molecular dynamics, discrete element model, granular dynamics, mesoscopic elastoplastic models, finite element models) with leading experts in the relevant fields of Earth sciences.
This confrontation should help:

• identify the concept of amorphous solid as a useful paradigm for several Earth science systems;
• popularize in the Earth science community the numerical methods used in material sciences;
• offer a consistent multi-scale approach of the flow of amorphous solids combining the micro, meso and macro scales;
• understand the mechanisms controlling the localization of the deformation;
• and identify outstanding theoretical and numerical challenges.

Workshop website