Events

UTIG Special Seminar: John Aiken, University of Oslo

Speaker: John Aiken, Researcher, NJORD Centre for Studies of the Physics of the Earth, University of Oslo

Host: Thorsten Becker

Title: SerpRateAI: Adventures in Data Mining the Oman Ophiolite

Abstract: Ophiolites are oceanic and near surface mantle rocks that have been thrust onto the continents. Some ophiolites like peridotite alter in low-temperature conditions in the presence of water absorbing and mineralizing CO₂, emitting byproducts such as elemental hydrogen and methane. This process, known as carbonation and serpentinization, is one of the many alteration chains that can be used for CO₂ sequestration and also has been linked to biogenesis, and crustal changes in mid-ocean ridges and subduction zones. To study how these rocks change the Oman Drilling Project created the Multi-borehole Observatory (MBO). The hope was by observing this area we can understand how it could be better utilized for scientific understanding and societal problems such as climate change. The MBO has produced tens of terabytes of multi-modal data including time series observations such as pore pressure changes, temperature, and seismic observations, core photos and x-ray tomography, and a large amount of other logging data. This talk will be about my adventure over the last few years in data mining these data. It will include successes and failures, my thought processes as to how I went about mining these data, and what the future of data mining the subsurface could look like. Across this talk, I will show evidence from various investigations that the MBO observes that the near subsurface is in an evolving state of change that is, perhaps, being driven by the climate.