Interactive digital 3D mapping in the Earth Sciences

The 3D structure of the top five kilometres of the Earth plays a crucial role in the economic welfare of nations: either in controlling the localisation of natural resources (groundwater, petroleum, minerals, geothermal energy) or from the earth’s potential use as a storage medium (CO2, nuclear waste). Prior to any program of physically based modelling, it is essential to develop geometric models of these structures as the transport properties of the earth are controlled by the connectivity defined by these structures.
The aim of this project is to improve our capacity to develop 3D models of the structure of the shallow Earth in real time during the structural geological data acquisition process i.e. all data concerning the position, orientation, spatial and temporal relationships of planar and linear features in rocks. This project will build upon existing commercial and research codes to develop algorithms capable of helping geologists to test their field observations in real time via predictive 3D from sparse datasets modelling.