CarboKitten.jl, an Open Source simulator for Carbonate Platform formation in Julia

Carbonate Platforms form an important source of information on the past evolution of species as well as the climate conditions they lived in. However, stratigraphic records are often considered unreliable tracers of evolution, since they contain many gaps.

These gaps are often on a time scale too short to measure, but may significantly affect further studies of biodiversity and climate change. This is why we use forward modelling to estimate the statistics of gap distributions under a wide variety of environmental parameters. Forward modelling can be used to test hypotheses at time scales that are not available for experimentation. The dominant driver for generating different stratigraphic architectures is the input sea-level curve, balancing periodic (Milankovich), stochastic and subsidence only effects. Added to that are varying degrees self-organisation, sediment transport and subarial erosion.

The basis of our model is sediment production following the model by Bosscher and Schlager (1992), with biological self-organisation modeled after the cellular automaton approach (CarboCAT) by Burgess (2013) and a sediment transport model inspired on Warrlich (2000).

CarboKitten is fully Open Source, written in Julia, aiming for performance, modularity and ease of use. We will show preliminary results produced by CarboKitten and also explain how they are generated.