IGPP is pleased to invite you to join its Winter 2023 Seminar Series presentation featuring University of British Columbia's Lindsey Heagy. Dr. Heagy's talk, "Computational Geophysics in a Changing Climate" will be available February 21, 2023 via Zoom: https://ucsd.zoom.us/j/94101604788?pwd=NTI4N01ydWo4UExIMWUwTUNPMUhsUT09 Password: igpp
Time: 12:00 pm, Pacific Time
Location: Zoom
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. Furthermore, openly licencing the code has created opportunities for collaboration and impact beyond our own research projects. I will discuss some of these impacts, including the development of educational resources in the GeoSci.xyz project as well as the use of open-source tools in a recent Geoscientists Without Borders project for locating groundwater in Myanmar.