Abstract¶
It is clear that the geosciences have an important role to play in working to understand and mitigate the societal impacts of the climate crisis. Locating critical minerals, monitoring geologic storage of CO2, managing groundwater, and characterizing changes to permafrost are all applications where geophysical data can provide insights. These applications raise interesting scientific questions about how to combine petrophysical, geologic, geochemical, and additional geophysical data sets to improve our ability to produce useful models of the subsurface. The next significant advancements will undoubtedly involve methodological improvements in inversions and machine learning, but importantly will require a more interdisciplinary approach, where the methods we design can be used to test and revise hypotheses specific to a given geologic context. We started the SimPEG project with the aim of accelerating research in this space and enabling researchers to build upon and contribute to a modular, flexible toolbox for solving problems in geophysics. At the core is a framework for finite volume forward simulations and gradient based inversions. In this talk, I will provide an overview of how we have broken down inverse problems in geophysics into modular components. I will illustrate how this has enabled research including understanding electromagnetics in settings with complex electrical and magnetic properties as well as the development of joint inversion methodologies. A related goal is broadening the use of geophysics to solve applied problems. By openly licensing the code and developing a suite of educational resources through the GeoSci.xyz project, we have been working to enable further adoption of geophysics. I will discuss some of these impacts, including in a recent Geoscientists Without Borders project for locating groundwater in Myanmar.
