Synthetic Geology -- Structural Geology Meets Deep Learning

Visualizing the first few kilometers of the Earth's subsurface, a long-standing challenge gating a virtually inexhaustible list of important applications, is coming within reach through deep learning. Building on techniques of generative artificial intelligence applied to voxelated images, we demonstrate a method that extends surface geological data supplemented by boreholes to a three-dimensional subsurface region by training a neural network. The Earth's land area having been extensively mapped for geological features, the bottleneck of this or any related technique is the availability of data below the surface. We close this data gap in the development of subsurface deep learning by designing a synthetic data-generator process that mimics eons of geological activity such as sediment compaction, volcanic intrusion, and tectonic dynamics to produce a virtually limitless number of samples of the near lithosphere. A foundation model trained on such synthetic data is able to generate a 3D image of the subsurface from a previously unseen map of surface topography and geology, showing increasing fidelity with increasing access to borehole data, depicting such structures as layers, faults, folds, dikes, and sills. We illustrate the early promise of the combination of a synthetic lithospheric generator with a trained neural network model using generative flow matching. Ultimately, such models will be fine-tuned on data from applicable campaigns, such as mineral prospecting in a given region. Though useful in itself, a regionally fine-tuned models may be employed not as an end but as a means: as an AI-based regularizer in a more traditional inverse problem application, in which the objective function represents the mismatch of additional data with physical models with applications in resource exploration, hazard assessment, and geotechnical engineering.

Inversion of Magnetic Data using Learned Dictionaries and Scale Space

Magnetic data inversion is an important tool in geophysics, used to infer subsurface magnetic susceptibility distributions from surface magnetic field measurements. This inverse problem is inherently ill-posed, characterized by non-unique solutions, depth ambiguity, and sensitivity to noise. Traditional inversion approaches rely on predefined regularization techniques to stabilize solutions, limiting their adaptability to complex or diverse geological scenarios. In this study, we propose an approach that integrates variable dictionary learning and scale-space methods to address these challenges. Our method employs learned dictionaries, allowing for adaptive representation of complex subsurface features that are difficult to capture with predefined bases. Additionally, we extend classical variational inversion by incorporating multi-scale representations through a scale-space framework, enabling the progressive introduction of structural detail while mitigating overfitting. We implement both fixed and dynamic dictionary learning techniques, with the latter introducing iteration-dependent dictionaries for enhanced flexibility. Using a synthetic dataset to simulate geological scenarios, we demonstrate significant improvements in reconstruction accuracy and robustness compared to conventional variational and dictionary-based methods. Our results highlight the potential of learned dictionaries, especially when coupled with scale-space dynamics, to improve model recovery and noise handling. These findings underscore the promise of our data-driven approach for advance magnetic data inversion and its applications in geophysical exploration, environmental assessment, and mineral prospecting.