Unsteady thermal convection in the North-East German Basin

Abstract

We describe a Voronoi box based finite volume method for the numerical simulation of thermal convection in sedimental basins. The method shows a temperature maximum principle and consistent velocity approximation. We present results of simulation runs in vertical slices of the North-East German basin. These indicate that the system is far from a stationary state, it shows quasi-periodic, and possibly chaotic behaviour. The chaos hypothesis is formulated based on the analysis of the Nusselt number time series obtaind from simulation runs.