Inaugural lecture – Klaus Mosegaard, DTU – Informatics and Center for Energy Resources Engineering (CERE)
Geophysicist, Dr.Sc. Klaus Mosegaard, 54 years old has just been appointed new Professor in Scientific Computing and Computational Geoscience. The professorship is a newly established position at DTU Informatics and Center for Energy Resources Engineering (CERE). The topic of the professorship is Scientific Computing with a special focus on Computational Geoscience. On this occasion DTU Informatics invites to the Inaugural lecture in meeting room S01, building 101, DTU, Friday 9 April at 15:00. The Inaugural lecture will be followed by a reception. Please see attached file
The Inaugural lecture will be held in English with the following topic:
Unraveling the Earth's interior by computational methods.
The Earth's interior hides mineral and energy resources, and it provides evidence of the planet's origin and development.
Unfortunatey, it is not accessible to direct observation, except for sparsely located boreholes reaching only a few kilometers into the crust.
Numerical methods are therefore indispensable keys to knowledge about the Earth's deep interior, and our only source of information about geological structures in exploration for minerals and energy resources. The methods exploit the relationship that exists between the subsurface geological structures and physical fields observed at the surface and in space: the gravitational field depends on rock densities, the magnetic field is generated by electric currents and magnetized material in the subsurface, and seismic waves are influenced by variations in elastic properties of the geological layers.
To exploit these correlations in the study of the subsurface we need to calculate backwards from the physical fields: gravity fields, magnetic fields and seismic waves are measurable effects, but it is their causes in the subsurface that we want to determine. This problem is known as 'the inverse problem'.
The lecture will discuss one of the most difficult of all inverse problems, namely the calculation of subsurface structure from seismic recordings. We will see how this problem is marred by uncertainties, ambiguities and nonlinearities, and why this is a major challenge to computational sciences. On the other hand, we will also see some of the beautiful geoscientific discoveries made by analyzing this problem, and examples of some of the most important applications of seismology in energy resources exploration.