News from the Underground

Things were pinging away in the main channels this week, with a few posts garnering loads of enthusiasm and important chatter.

The weirder the better — In the #viz channel, Nathan announced the latest Xeek challenge, Keep Geoscience Weird. This competition is all about new and novel ways of visualizing subsurface data. It’s a very open-ended competition — you can use any data that you like, as long as it’s related to the subsurface. I highly recommend reading the thread concerning the Terms & Conditions and motivations for engagement.

Sand vs shale — The longest thread of the week (150+ messages!) was in the #sedimentology channel. A simple question about computing running averages led to uncovering a bug in striplog, some plots (right), a hackathon project, and some weirdness in how Microsoft Excel exports CSV files.

Hello OSDU, how do you do? — The Open Subsurface Data Universe (OSDU) Forum is a consortium of ~200 members and is rolling out the first production release of its platform this week. For a bit of history on how the OSDU came to be, who’s involved, and where it’s headed, this thread might be a good summary.

But seriously. Who’s with me? — Has anyone ever given any serious consideration to prospecting and mining asteroids or other planetary bodies for resources? Turns out they have.

Teeny weeny ancient plant bits — Kieran threw some Carboniferous kerogen samples into the SEM and shared these gorgeous images. The discussion drifted naturally to “should I put 300 of these images online somewhere for others to look at and play with?”

How to get lost — Kleo asked for recommendations for introductory Python exercises, and got a load of responses. A few folks pointed to last year’s TRANSFORM tutorials. In another channel, Heba got a somewhat philosophical perspective from Hallgrim on the pursuit of programming: “[it’s] all about getting lost, banging your head against the wall, and the extreme pleasure of breaking through the wall. You are already lost, you’ve already found this community, so you have a great talent for what is ahead of you…”.

What was your favourite thread of the week?

News from the Underground

Welcome to the news post! Here’s what’s hot this week in the Underground.

Just in time help — One of the hallmarks of the Underground is fast help with digital workflows. It easily beats Google for those occasions when you’re not even sure what to search for. On Monday, Mads asked how to get a horizon slice through a 3D seismic volume. Within minutes he had suggestions using the awesome segysak tool, or just xarray on its own, or pure SciPy.

How does your river flow? — Got an elevation model but it’s too low resolution for your watershed model? There were lots of good recommendations for software that may be helpful here. And don’t forget about the glorious geospatial tool that is QGIS — free and open source.

Unfolded Studio – Not to be confused with a room where structural geologists do palinspastic reconstruction, Justin Gosses posted a link to this new project from the folks at Uber who built kepler. If you’re into geospatial analytics, you need to see this, it looks beautiful.

The maestro of the meandering – Zoltan Sylvester’s 3D stratigraphic displays got a mention in the #viz channel. It’s worth checking out the README to his repo, it has plenty of the fluvial stratigraphic eye candy you’d expect from Zoltan.

Sedimentary logs as data — Sometimes data is locked away in Adobe Illustrator drawings. John Armitage asked about converting a pile of drawings of sedimentary logs into structured data, and got lots of suggestions. He eventually got striplog to work on most of the data. The power of Swung!

Contests and openness – Bobbing in the wake of the SPE contest we mentioned last week, Matt wrote an open letter to TGS about the licensing of the data and there was some chat about it on Slack. If you care about data science contests, community engagement, and how to maximize innovation and impact, give the post a read.

See anything else in the channels I may have missed? Leave a note in the comments.

News from the Underground

Hello! Welcome to the first of a series of (hopefully) regular round-ups and highlights from what’s happening in the Software Underground. We’ll cover announcements and cool events, plus anything we think is relevant, popular, or just cool.

The heart of the Software Underground is the Slack workspace. It’s so busy these days that it’s hard to catch everything, so we hope this round-up helps. True to the nature of geoscience, our selection criteria will be a mix of quantitative and qualitative. And as scientists, we’ll allow ourselves the freedom to improve our methods over time. Disagree with something? Tell us about it.

We’ve put links here that will take you directly to the messages in Slack. Just keep in mind that you’ll have to be logged into your account for those to work. If you’re not a member yet, sign up here — it’s free.

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SPE Data Analytics wireline log contest – An announcement was made about this new competition. The entrance fee, though small, was an initial surprise to some, but apparently the revenue will go toward SPE student scholarships. Another conversation surfaced on how tricky it is to evaluate the submissions in relatively niche contests such as these. The contest launches today, 15 January.

Jupyter Notebooks in Excel – Apparently there are two types of people in the subsurface world: those who use Excel, and those who are in Software Underground. LOL. Seriously though, a link about embedding Jupyter notebooks in Excel brought a mixture shock and horror.

Anaconda Navigator != conda – Confused about what Anaconda Navigator brings to the table? So are others in the community! Many of us prefer the command-line conda tool, but that comes with its own challenges, as discussed in this thread on teaching about environments. Do you use Navigator? Do you like it? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Connecting the dots – Creating linestrings from collection X and Y coordinates is straightforward if you know the sequence in which the dots are connected. If the points aren’t ordered, then the problem is more difficult. Some good discussions were bolstered by Leo Uieda’s gentle nudge, “We’d love to have this sort of thing in Verde if you’re keen on contributing.”

Wherefore art thou open data? – The need for open data came out of a member testing a seismic well-tie algorithm. Several folks pointed him toward a number of open data sets. A number of the usual suspects that come up again and again are: SEG wiki, F3, UK Oil and Gas Authority, and the Data Underground. The Data Underground is a Swung project, so you should definitely poke around and let us know what else might live there. Open Data. Yes please. Let’s have some more of that.

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The quality and speed of the knowledge sharing in the Software Underground is truly remarkable. Whether you’re asking questions, responding to others, or just sharing something that’s cool, we are all bettered by it. See you in Slack!