GHOST: Geoscientific Hollow Sphere Tessellation

Abstract

I present in this work the GHOST (Geoscientific Hollow Sphere Tessellation) software which allows for the fast generation of computational meshes in hollow sphere geometries counting up to 100 million cells. Each mesh is composed of concentric spherical shells which are built out of quadrilaterals or triangles. I focus here on three commonly used meshes used in geodynamics/geophysics and demonstrate the accuracy of shell surfaces and mesh volume measurements as a function of resolution. I further benchmark the built-in gravity and gravitational potential procedures in the simple case of a constant density geometry and finally show how the produced meshes can be used to visualise the S40RTS mantle tomography model. The code is open source and is available on the GitHub sharing platform.