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Challenge Team Interim Report

Team Number: 006 School Name: Los Alamos High School Area of Science: Earth Science Project Title: Three Dimensional Erosion Modeling

Problem Definition:
The environment in which people live shapes human civilization throughout the world. The weather in a region influences what crops people grow, and what type of houses they build. Another important aspect of civilization is the landscape on which the people live. If you live high in the mountains of India you will live a very different life then if you are on the Great Plains. Also, the landscape on which we live is always changing, though few people realize it. The goal of our project is to create an accurate module of a landscape and simulate the changes caused by erosion over time.

Problem Solution:
The first step was to generate a landscape to 'experiment' on. For now, we are using a randomly generated landscape. We tried several different erosion algorithms; this served two purposes: one, we were able to find a decent algorithm, and two; we were able to use ideas from all of our algorithms to improve our final product. We also worked with a geologist to identify problems and suggest possible solutions. In time this should allow us to present a fairly accurate representation of three-dimensional erosion. We can also use this technique to generate images of the landscape in various stages of erosion.

Progress:
We have collected as large amount of information on erosion, and have started to write our code. Currently, our code represents fluvial erosion with a large degree of accuracy, but has been unable to simulate mass wasting. The program outputs it's data into a file which a mathematic program, such as Matlab, can read and display as a three dimensional graph. We also have a prototype of a Java applet viewer that can display the data.

Expected Results:
We expect to be able to construct a three-dimensional model of a randomly generated landscape and display an animation of it being eroded.

Team Members

Team Mail

• David Hunter
• Sergey Kurennoy
• Mark Hargreaves

Sponsoring Teacher

• Dick Powell

Project Advisor

• Shari Kelley