RECENT HEILAND LECTURES

Geophysical monitoring at Delft campus geothermal well

Evert Slob
Delft University of Technology

Seismic Monitoring at Utah FORGE: What We Have Learned and What is Next

Kristine Pankow
University of Utah

Characterizing an earthquake rupture barrier at the Gofar oceanic transform fault using controlled-source electromagnetic data

Christine Chesley
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

CATALOG: A United States National Laboratory Consortium for the Identification and Characterization of Undocumented Oil and Gas Wells

Chester Weiss
Sandia National Laboratories

Hydro-mechanical anisotropy in Oklahoma’s wastewater disposal reservoir from strain and fluid pressure measurements

Andy Barbour
U.S. Geological Survey

NEIC The Next Generation: Leveraging machine learning at the U.S. Geological Survey National Earthquake Information Center

William Yeck
USGS National Earthquake Information Center

Coupling effects of source-path-site for microseismicity characterization

Nori Nakata
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

The Antarctic coastal cryosphere is a complex and fascinating coupled system with global implications

Laurie Padman
Earth and Space Research

Objective Seismic Insight

Greg Partyka
OpenGeoSolutions

Interactions between the ice, ocean and solid Earth in Antarctica and their implications for global sea levels

Natalya Gomez
McGill University

A cycle of memory creation, erasure, and phase transitions in granular assemblages sheared by natural faults

Dr. Vashan Wright
UC-San Diego

The Geophysics of Rubble Pile Asteroids

Daniel J. Scheeres
University of Colorado

MONITORING WATER DISTRIBUTION AND DYNAMICS IN THE CRITICAL ZONE?
GEOPHYSICISTS HAVE THE POTENTIAL!

Damien Jougnot
Sorbonne University, Paris, France

Science in Service to Society: The Evolving Role of the U.S. Geological Survey

David Applegate
Director, United States Geological Survey

Jointly sponsored by Geology & Geological Engineering, Geophysics, Earth & Society Programs, USGS Geologic Hazards Science Center, Office of Global Initiatives

Near-surface Geophysics in Alaska

Esther Babcock
Logic Geophysics & Analytics, LLC

Potential for Geologic Hydrogen Gas Resources: Myth or Miracle?

Geoffrey Ellis
United States Geological Survey

Physics-guided Learning-driven Seismic Inversion: Synthetic Practice to Field Applications

Youzou Lin
Los Alamos National Laboratory

SEIS on Mars:  First Legacy after Four Years of Seismic Monitoring of Mars

Philippe Lognonné
Université Paris Cité, Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, CNRS, Paris, France

The Overturning Circulation of the West Antarctic Shelf Seas

Andy Thompson
California Institute of Technology

Why Does the Moon Exist? Its Formation and its Perilous Early Fate

Erik Asphaug
University of Arizona

Source to Sink: Tracing Freshwater Beneath the Antarctic Ice Sheet

Matthew Siegfried
Colorado School of Mines

Geophysics and Computers: Together on a journey from the earliest CPUs, GPUs and into the clouds

Sverre Brandsberg-Dahl
Microsoft Azure

Geophysicists were quick in recognizing the potential of computers to help them carry out the many calculations needed when working to assess subsurface properties. Geophysicists are also experts in leveraging mathematics to create the computational frameworks needed to solve the key tasks they rely on in this work, like wavefield modeling, inversion, and large-scale optimization. In this presentation I will review how the field of geophysics, or maybe more accurately, computational geophysics have evolved along with the evolution of computers as a framing for offering some thoughts on where this journey might lead in the future.

Although many of the mathematical methods rely on approximations in the physics and geometry of the problem (dimensionality), the frontier of computational geophysics has pretty much tracked the frontier of computing by progressively adopting more accurate mathematical models and better physics in their problem definition. At any time, geophysical algorithms for imaging and inversion were pushing the limits of what was possible with the best and largest computers, quickly turning the industry into a dominant player in the field of high-performance computing (HPC). The leading companies deployed HPC infrastructure that rivaled that of the national labs, using this ever-increasing capability to solve ever more difficult subsurface imaging problems, unlocking vital energy reserves as a result. Can the growth in compute power continue indefinitely?

There is no way of predicting this, but I will argue that the emergence of cloud computing along with the economic conditions surrounding the industry, are forcing the development and adoption of new approaches to computing. Cloud computing has been a game changer for so many things in society, including geophysics, but it can sometimes be hard to see how this is the case unless we unpack the ‘cloud stack’ within the correct context. The hardware and computers are maybe the same, but the cloud services offer up new and exciting ways to think about and address the computational challenges. Although I will not endeavor to provide firm answers to this question, I will review multiple, emerging, cloud-based technologies that can impact the field of geophysics and be leveraged by the many clever people that work in the field, from server-less architecture applied to solving large-scale modeling and optimization to the role of AI as manifested in the fast evolving field of very large language models.

By adopting a software-defined computational framework, I postulate that a similar computational growth rate that the field has benefitted from in the past can also be sustained going forward, allowing new insights to be gained and help provide real a foundation for tackling some of the truly hard geophysical problems that are still out there.

Speaker Bio: Dr. Sverre Brandsberg-Dahl is the CTO for Microsoft’s Energy Engineering organization. Here he works with a range of engineering teams to bring the latest technological developments in Cloud Computing and AI to the energy industry. With a passion for technology and innovation, he is helping to position Microsoft with customers, partners, and governments as they accelerate their adoption of cloud technology, while giving equal focus to the transition to clean power and emissions management.

Prior to joining Microsoft, Sverre spent 16 years in various technical positions across the oil and gas industry. Sverre holds a PhD from The Center for Wave Phenomena (CWP) at Mines and an MSc from The Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

Distinguished Alumni Lecture: Volcano Seismology in the Aleutian Islands 

Matt Haney,
USGS/Alaska Volcano Observatory

Variations and Healing of the Seismic Velocity

Dr. Roel Snieder
Colorado School of Mines

Data Science and Machine Learning for Climate Science and Modeling

Katie Dagon
National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)

Monitoring and Predicting Shoreline Changes Along the California Coast Using Remote Sensing Data

Dr. Susheel Adusumilli 
Scripps Institution of Oceanography

Physical processes of environmental seismic sources revealed by surface wavefields

Wenyuan Fan
University of California-San Diego