Dietmar Müller – The Conversation

Thingvellir national park, where two tectonic plates meet in Iceland. Tina Zupancic/Getty Images

January 19, 2026

The way Earth’s surface moves has a bigger impact on shifting the climate than we knew

Ben Mather, The University of Melbourne; Adriana Dutkiewicz, University of Sydney; Dietmar Müller, University of Sydney, and Sabin Zahirovic, University of Sydney

Earth has experienced many icehouse and greenhouse climates. A new study shows how they connect to plate tectonics.

Dietmar Muller

March 12, 2024

New evidence for an unexpected player in Earth’s multimillion‑year climate cycles: the planet Mars

Adriana Dutkiewicz, University of Sydney; Dietmar Müller, University of Sydney, and Slah Boulila, Sorbonne Université

Deep-sea sediments show how the changing orbits of Earth and Mars are linked to past global warming and the speeding up of deep-ocean eddies.

Salvatore Allegra / AP

May 25, 2022

How plate tectonics, mountains and deep‑sea sediments have maintained Earth’s ‘Goldilocks’ climate

Dietmar Müller, University of Sydney; Adriana Dutkiewicz, University of Sydney; Andrew Merdith, University of Leeds; Ben Mather, University of Sydney; Christopher Gonzalez, The University of Western Australia; Sabin Zahirovic, University of Sydney; Tobias Keller, ETH Zurich; Weronika Gorczyk, The University of Western Australia, and Jo Condon, The University of Melbourne

New modelling shows how tectonic plate movements, carbon-rich deep-sea sediment, and mountain weathering have regulated Earth’s climate.

Stunning mosaic of oxidised copper in the form of azurite (blue) and malachite (green) in a rock. Dimitri Houtteman

July 14, 2021

Travelling through deep time to find copper for a clean energy future

Dietmar Müller, University of Sydney; Jo Condon, The University of Melbourne; Julian Diaz, University of Sydney, and Rohitash Chandra, UNSW

Using geology and AI, a virtual model of how the Earth’s tectonic plates have evolved can help reveal deposits of copper.

Luisa Denu / Unsplash

December 18, 2020

Eastern Australia has hundreds of enigmatic volcanoes. New research shows how they formed

Ben Mather, University of Sydney; Dietmar Müller, University of Sydney; Jo Condon, The University of Melbourne; Maria Seton, University of Sydney, and Oliver Nebel, Monash University

From far north Queensland to the southern tip of Tasmania, there is a common geological mechanism that links Eastern Australia’s volcanic history.

Photographed on Kangaroo Island, this rock – called a ‘zebra schist’ – deformed from flat-lying marine sediments through being stressed by a continental collision over 500 million years ago. Dietmar Muller

May 8, 2019

How Earth’s continents became twisted and contorted over millions of years

Dietmar Müller, University of Sydney; Maria Seton, University of Sydney, and Sabin Zahirovic, University of Sydney

Giant forces slowly move continents across a viscous layer of the Earth, like biscuits gliding over a warm toffee ocean. This stresses the continents, and twists and contorts the crust.

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