One of the most popular cloud services for python / jupyter - based codes is binder (www.mybinder.org) which can transform an online repository into a running instance in the cloud with little effort on the part of the owner of that repository to set it up and no effort at all for the end user.

The Underworld 2.9 release is available from Github, as a docker container and via zenodo (doi:10.5281/zenodo.3964957) it is also available through pip install for the first time (see below). Underworld paper in the Journal of Open Source Software The paper of record for underworld 2 has been published. It does tie to the Underworld 2.9 release but is sufficiently broad to cite for all 2.x releases.

A new paper by John Mansour and others has just been published in the Journal of Open Source Software. Mansour, J., Giordani, J., Moresi, L., Beucher, R., Kaluza, O.,  Velic,  M., Farrington, R., Quenette, S., Beall, A., 2020, Underworld2:  Python  Geodynamics Modelling for Desktop, HPC and Cloud, Journal of Open

As the old truism states, the best way to learn is by doing. This is terribly unhelpful since, really, you can't 'do' anything until you learn. This is a Catch-22 that every grad student encounters; doubly so when it comes to anything involving code, where daily life provides very little in the way of intuition. Unlike other geodynamic modelling software, Underworld is designed to be approached with code.

How we added an auto-updating set of citations to underworld in our publications webpage. We need to curate all the publications that we can find that use the underworld geodynamics code and provide this information on our website. To avoid needless repetition, we take advantage of the fact that nearly all the information we require is online and automatically construct the bibliography from an online public zotero library.

Version 2.8 of Underworld has been released recently. As with all major releases, this release brings numerous new features, enhancements and bug fixes. A summary of changes may be found within the usual CHANGES.md file. As is also usually the case, numerous API changes have been necessary or warranted.

Viscoelastic materials exhibit the properies of both solids and liquids, with deformation rates dependent on both the viscous stress and elastic stress rate.

Making your research reproducible means that you provide the entire workflow from data, through software and post-processing freely available. Not only can somebody repeat your experiments and verify them, they can build upon them. In lab-based disciplines, there are many further challenges, but in research that is predominantly based on data processing, this ought to be an achievable goal.

Zenodo is a repository for immutable versions of software that are provided with a persistent DOI for the purposes of citation and reproducibility.   Underworld can be cited via a zenodo DOI. There is a master DOI for all releases (10.5281/zenodo.1436039) and releases after 2.6.0 are automatically given a DOI _under the master_.

(they don't make them like they used to ... ) Cratons are anomalously-strong regions of the continents that have largely resisted tectonic forces for billions of years. How such strong zones could be forged in a hot, low-viscosity, low stress,  early-Earth has been a long-standing puzzle for geologists.