My first exposure to numerical modeling in earth science was right after high school graduation, where I got in contact with Prof. Vinamra Agrawal, a former PhD student at Caltech, who worked on impact simulations of craters. The simulation software is called iSALE, Fortran-based (I believe), and to this day, I do not understand the mechanism and the constitutive equations and whatnot — which is the first hint why this blog post is in the "Artwork" section.
Vinamra was incredibly patient with a high school student who barely knew Python, but like any skill, after multiple exposures, I was soon able to learn how to change parameters and make visuals like the ones on this page. Of course, without knowing what is actually happening underneath the Fortran codes, you cannot do proper science, so the project was more of a parameter sweep, I would say.
One thing I did slightly differently was that typical iSALE simulations are interested in surface deformation after an impact, but I was interested in asteroid deformation during atmospheric entry, so I remember tweaking the code to start from the atmosphere instead of the surface — and this was the project that won a visualization competition at AGU.
Anyway, here are some saved photos that remain after three laptop transitions, and I think they all still look really cool.
