# Poisson's controversial stretch-squeeze ratio

Before reading this, you might want to check out the previous post about Siméon Denis Poisson's life and career. Then come back here...

Physicists and mathematicians knew about Poisson's ratio well before Poisson got involved with it. Thomas Young described it in his 1807 Lectures on Natural Philosophy and the Mechanical Arts:

We may easily observe that if we compress a piece of elastic gum in any direction, it extends itself in other directions: if we extend it in length, its breadth and thickness are diminished.

Young didn't venture into a rigorous formal definition, and it was referred to simply as the 'stretch-squeeze ratio'.

### A new elastic constant?

Twenty years later, at a time when France's scientific muscle was fading along with the reign of Napoleon, Poisson published a paper attempting to restore his slightly bruised (by his standards) reputation in the mechanics of physical materials. In it, he stated that for a solid composed of molecules tightly held together by central forces on a crystalline lattice, the stretch squeeze ratio should equal 1/2 (which is equivalent to what we now call a Poisson's ratio of 1/4). In other words, Poisson regarded the stretch-squeeze ratio as a physical constant: the same value for all solids, claiming, 'This result agrees perfectly' with an experiment that one of his colleagues, Charles Cagniard de la Tour, recently performed on brass.

Poisson's whole-hearted subscription to the corpuscular school certainly prejudiced his work. But the notion of discovering of a new physical constant, like Newton did for gravity, or Einstein would eventually do for light, must have been a powerful driving force. A would-be singular elastic constant could unify calculations for materials soft or stiff — in contrast to elastic moduli which vary over several orders of magnitude.

### Poisson's (silly) ratio

Later, between 1850 and 1870, the physics community acquired more evidence that the stretch-squeeze ratio was different for different materials, as other materials were deformed with more reliable measurements. Worse still, de la Tour's experiments on the elasticity of brass, upon which Poisson had hung his hat, turned out to be flawed. The stretch-squeeze ratio became known as Poisson's ratio not as a tribute to Poisson, but as a way of labeling a flawed theory. Indeed, the falsehood became so apparent that it drove the scientific community towards treating elastic materials as continuous media, as opposed to an ensemble of particles.

Today we define Poisson's ratio in terms of strain (deformation), or Lamé's parameters, or the speed $$V$$ of P- and S-waves:

Interestingly, if Poisson turned out to be correct, and Poisson's ratio was in fact a constant, that would mean that the number of elastic constants it would take to describe an isotropic material would be one instead of two. It wasn't until Augustin Louis Cauchy used the notion of a stress tensor to describe the state of stress at a point within a material, with its three normal stresses and three shear stresses, did the need for two elastic constants become apparent. Tensors gave the mathematical framework to define Hooke's law in three dimensions. Found in the opening chapter in any modern textbook on seismology or mechanical engineering, continuum mechanics represents a unique advancement in science set out to undo Poisson's famously false deductions backed by insufficient data.

References

Greaves, N (2013). Poisson's ratio over two centuries: challenging hypothesis. Notes & Records of the Royal Society 67, 37-58. DOI: 10.1098/rsnr.2012.0021

Editorial (2011). Poisson's ratio at 200, Nature Materials10 (11) Available online.

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# Great geophysicists #13: Poisson

Siméon Denis Poisson was born in Pithiviers, France, on 21 June 1781. While still a teenager, Poisson entered the prestigious École Polytechnique in Paris, and published his first papers in 1800. He was immediately befriended — or adopted, really — by Lagrange and Laplace. So it's safe to say that he got off to a pretty good start as a mathematician. The meteoric trajectory continued throughout his career, as Poisson received more or less every honour a French scientist could accumulate. Along with Laplace and Lagrange — as well as Fresnel, Coulomb, Lamé, and Fourier — his is one of the 72 names on the Eiffel Tower.

### Wrong Poisson

In the first few decades following the French Revolution, which ended in 1799, France enjoyed a golden age of science. The Société d’Acrueil was a regular meeting of savants, hosted by Laplace and the chemist Claude Louis Berthollet, and dedicated to the exposition of physical phenomena. The group worked on problems like the behaviour of gases, the physics of sound and light, and the mechanics of deformable materials. Using Newton's then 120-year-old law of gravitation as an analogy, the prevailing school of thought accounted for all physical phenomena in terms of forces acting between particles.

Poisson was not flawless. As one of the members of this intellectual inner circle, Poisson was devoted to the corpuscular theory of light. Indeed, he dismissed the wave theory of light completely, until proven wrong by Thomas Young and, most conspicuously, Augustin-Jean Fresnel. Even Poisson's ratio, the eponymous elastic modulus, wasn't the result of his dogged search for truth, but instead represents a controversy that drove the development of the three-dimensional theory of elasticity. More on this next time.

### The workaholic

Although he did make time for his wife and four children — but only after 6 pm — Poisson apparently had little time for much besides mathematics. His catchphrase was

Life is only good for two things: doing mathematics and teaching it.

In the summer of 1838, he learned he had a form of tuberculosis. According to James (2002), he was unable to take time away from work for long enough to recuperate. Eventually, insisting on conducting the final exams at the Polytechnique for the 23rd year in a row, he took on more than he could handle. He died on 20 April 1840.

References

Grattan-Guinness, I. (1990). Convolutions in French Mathematics, 1800-1840: From the Calculus and Mechanics to Mathematical Analysis and Mathematical Physics. Vol.1: The Setting. Springer Science & Business Media. 549 pages.

Ioan James, I (2002). Remarkable Mathematicians: From Euler to Von Neumann. Cambridge University Press, 433 pages.

The University of St Andrews MacTutor archive article on Poisson.

Comment

### Matt Hall

I am a geoscientist in Nova Scotia, Canada. Founder of Agile Geoscience, co-founder of The HUB South Shore. Into geology, geophysics, programming in Python, and knowledge sharing (especially wikis).

# ORCL vs GOOG: the $9 billion API What's this? Two posts about the legal intricacies of copyright in the space of a fortnight? Before you unsubscribe from this definitely-not-a-law-blog, please read on because the case of Oracle America, Inc vs Google, Inc is no ordinary copyright fight. For a start, the damages sought by Oracle in this case exceed$9 billion. And if they win, all hell is going to break loose.

The case is interesting for some other reasons besides the money and the hell breaking loose thing. I'm mostly interested in it because it's about open source software. Specifically, it's about Android, Google's open source mobile operating system. The claim is that the developers of Android copied 37 application programming interfaces, or APIs, from the Java software environment that Sun released in 1995 and Oracle acquired in its \$7.4 billion acquisition of Sun in 2010. There were also claims that they copied specific code, not just the interface the code presents to the user, but it's the API bit that's interesting.

### What's an API then?

You might think of software in terms of applications like the browser you're reading this in, or the seismic interpretation package you use. But this is just one, very high-level, type of software. Other, much lower-level software runs your microwave. Developers use software to build software; these middle levels contain FORTRAN libraries for tasks like signal processing, tools for making windows and menus appear, and still others for drawing, or checking spelling, or drawing shapes. You can think of an API like a user interface for programmers. Where the user interface in a desktop application might have menus and dialog boxes, the interface for a library has classes and methods — pieces of code that hold data or perform tasks. A good API can be a pleasure to use. A bad API can make grown programmers cry. Or at least make them write a new library.

The Android developers didn't think the Java API was bad. In fact, they loved it. They tried to license it from Sun in 2007 and, when Sun was bought by Oracle, from Oracle. When this didn't work out, they locked themselves in a 'cleanroom' and wrote a runtime environment called Dalvik. It implemented the same API as the Java Virtual Machine, but with new code. The question is: does Oracle own the interface — the method names and syntaxes? Are APIs copyrightable?

### I thought this case ended years ago?

It did. Google already won the argument once, on 31 May 2012, when the court held that APIs are "a system or method of operations" and therefore not copyrightable. Here's the conclusion of that ruling:

The original 2012 holding that Google did not violate the copyright Act by copying 37 of Java's interfaces. Click for the full PDF.

But it went to the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, Google's petition for 'fair use' was denied, and the decision was sent back to the district court for a jury trial to decide on Google's defence. So now the decision will be made by 10 ordinary citizens... none of whom know anything about programming. (There was a computer scientist in the pool, but Oracle sent him home. It's okay --- Google sent a free-software hater packing.)

This snippet from one of my favourite podcasts, Leo Laporte's Triangulation, is worth watching. Leo is interviewing James Gosling, the creator of Java, who was involved in some of the early legal discovery process...

The problem with all this is that, when it come to open source software and the Internet, APIs make the world go round. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation argued on behalf of 77 computer scientists (including Alan Kay, Vint Cerf, Hal Abelson, Ray Kurzweil, Guido van Rossum, and Peter Norvig, ) in its amicus brief for the Supreme Court... we need uncopyrightable interfaces to get computers to cooperate. This is what drove the personal computer explosion of the 1980s, the Internet explosion of the 1990s, and the cloud computing explosion of the 2000s, and most people seem to think those were awesome. The current bot explosion also depends on APIs, but the jury is out (lol) on how awesome that one is.

The trial continues. Google concluded its case yesterday, and Oracle called its first witness, co-CEO Safra Catz. "We did not buy Sun to file this lawsuit," she said. Reassuring, but if they win there's going to be a lot of that going around. A lot.

For a much more in-depth look at the story behind the trial, this epic article by Sarah Jeong is awesome. Follow the rest of the events over the next few days on Ars Technica, Twitter, or wherever you get your news. Meanwhile on Agile*, we will return to normal geophysical programming, I promise :)

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### Matt Hall

I am a geoscientist in Nova Scotia, Canada. Founder of Agile Geoscience, co-founder of The HUB South Shore. Into geology, geophysics, programming in Python, and knowledge sharing (especially wikis).

Seismic company GSI has sued a lot of organizations recently for sharing its copyrighted seismic data, undermining its business. A recent court decision found that seismic data is indeed copyrightable, but Canadian petroleum regulations can override the copyright. This allows data to be disclosed by the regulator and copied by others — made public, effectively.

### Seismic data is not like other data

Data is uncopyrightable. Like facts and ideas, data is considered objective, uncreative — too cold to copyright. But in an important ruling last month, the Honourable Madam Justice Eidsvik established at the Alberta Court of the Queen's Bench that seismic data is not like ordinary data. According to this ruling:

...the creation of field and processed [seismic] data requires the exercise of sufficient skill and judgment of the seismic crew and processors to satisfy the requirements of [copyrightability].

These requirements were established in the case of accounting firm CCH Canadian Limited vs The Law Society of Upper Canada (2004) in the Supreme Court of Canada. Quoting from that ruling:

What is required to attract copyright protection in the expression of an idea is an exercise of skill and judgment. By skill, I mean the use of one’s knowledge, developed aptitude or practised ability in producing the work. By judgment, I mean the use of one’s capacity for discernment or ability to form an opinion or evaluation by comparing different possible options in producing the work.

Interestingly:

There exist no cases expressly deciding whether Seismic Data is copyrightable under the American Copyright Act [in the US].

Fortunately, Justice Eidsvik added this remark to her ruling — just in case there was any doubt:

I agree that the rocks at the bottom of the sea are not copyrightable.

It's really worth reading through some of the ruling, especially sections 7 and 8, entitled Ideas and facts are not protected and Trivial and purely mechanical respectively.

This recent ruling about seismic data was the result of an action brought by Geophysical Service Incorporated against pretty much anyone they could accuse of infringing their rights in their offshore seismic data, by sharing it or copying it in some way. Specifically, the claim was that data they had been required to submit to regulators like the C-NLOPB and the C-NSOPB was improperly shared, undermining its business of shooting seismic data on spec.

You may not have heard of GSI, but the company has a rich history as a technical and business innovator. The company was the precursor to Texas Instruments, a huge player in the early development of computing hardware — seismic processing was the 'big data' of its time. GSI still owns the largest offshore seismic dataset in Canada. Recently, however, the company seems to have focused entirely on litigation.

The Calgary company brought more than 25 lawsuits in Alberta alone against corporations, petroleum boards, and others. There have been other actions in other jurisdictions. This ruling is just the latest one; here's the full list of defendants in this particular suit (there were only 25, but some were multiple entities):

• NWest Energy Corp.
• Shoal Point Energy Ltd.
• Vulcan Minerals Inc.
• Corridor Resources Inc.
• CalWest Printing and Reproductions
• Arcis Seismic Solutions Corp.
• Exploration Geosciences (UK) Limited
• Lynx Canada Information Systems Ltd.
• Olympic Seismic Ltd.
• Jebco Seismic UK Limited
• Jebco Seismic, LP
• Jebco/Sei Partnership LLC
• Encana Corporation
• Imperial Oil Limited
• BP Canada Energy Group ULC
• Total S.A.
• Edison S.P.A.
• Edison International S.P.A.
• MGM Energy Corp
• Husky Oil Limited
• Husky Oil Operations Limited
• Nalcor Energy – Oil and Gas Inc.
• Suncor Energy Inc.
• Murphy Oil Company Ltd.
• Devon ARL Corporation

### Why did people share the data?

According to Section 101 Disclosure of Information of the Canada Petroleum Resources Act (1985) , geophysical data should be released to regulators — and thus, effectively, the public — five years after acquisition:

(2) Subject to this section, information or documentation is privileged if it is provided for the purposes of this Act [...]
(2.1) Subject to this section, information or documentation that is privileged under subsection 2 shall not knowingly be disclosed without the consent in writing of the person who provided it, except for the purposes of the administration or enforcement of this Act [...]

(7) Subsection 2 does not apply in respect of the following classes of information or documentation obtained as a result of carrying on a work or activity that is authorized under the Canada Oil and Gas Operations Act, namely, information or documentation in respect of

(d) geological work or geophysical work performed on or in relation to any frontier lands,
(i) in the case of a well site seabed survey [...], or
(ii) in any other case, after the expiration of five years following the date of completion of the work;

As far as I can tell, this does not necessarily happen, by the way. There seems to be a great deal of confusion in Canada about what 'seismic data' actually is — companies submit paper versions, sometimes with poor processing, or perhaps only every 10th line of a 3D. But the Canada Oil and Gas Geophysical Operations Regulations are quite clear. This is from the extensive and pretty explicit 'Final Report' requirements:

(j) a fully processed, migrated seismic section for each seismic line recorded and, in the case of a 3-D survey, each line generated from the 3-D data set;

The intent is quite clear: the regulators are entitled to the stacked, migrated data. The full list is worth reading, it covers a large amount of data. If this is enforced, it is not very rigorous. If these datasets ever make it into the hands of the regulators, and I doubt it ever all does, then it's still subject to the haphazard data management practices that this industry has ubiquitously adopted.

GSI argued that 'disclosure', as set out in Section 101 of the Act, does not imply the right to copy, but the court was unmoved:

Nonetheless, I agree with the Defendants that [Section 101] read in its entirety does not make sense unless it is interpreted to mean that permission to disclose without consent after the expiry of the 5 year period [...] must include the ability to copy the information. In effect, permission to access and copy the information is part of the right to disclose.

So this is the heart of the matter: the seismic data was owned and copyrighted by GSI, but the regulations specify that seismic data must be submitted to regulators, and that they can disclose that data to others. There's obvious conflict between these ideas, so which one prevails?

### The decision

There is a principle in law called Generalia Specialibus Non Derogant. Quoting from another case involving GSI:

Where two provisions are in conflict and one of them deals specifically with the matter in question while the other is of more general application, the conflict may be avoided by applying the specific provision to the exclusion of the more general one. The specific prevails over the more general: it does not matter which was enacted first.

Quoting again from the recent ruling in GSI vs Encana et al.:

Parliament was aware of the commercial value of seismic data and attempted to take this into consideration in its legislative drafting. The considerations balanced in this regard are the same as those found in the Copyright Act, i.e. the rights of the creator versus the rights of the public to access data. To the extent that GSI feels that this policy is misplaced, its rights are political ones – it is not for this Court to change the intent of Parliament, unfair as it may be to GSI’s interests.

Finally:

[...the Regulatory Regime] is a complete answer to the suggestion that the Boards acted unlawfully in disclosing the information and documentation to the public. The Regulatory Regime is also a complete answer to whether the copying companies and organizations were entitled to receive and copy the information and documentation for customers. For the oil companies, it establishes that there is nothing unlawful about accessing or copying the information from the Boards [...]

So that's it: the data was copyright, but the regulations override the copyright, effectively. The regulations were legal, and — while GSI might find the result unfair — it must operate under them.

The decision must be another step towards the end of this ugly matter. Maybe it's the end. I'm sure those (non-lawyers) involved can't wait for it to be over. I hope GSI finds a way back to its technical core and becomes a great company again. And I hope the regulators find ways to better live up to the fundamental idea behind releasing data in the first place: that the availability of the data to the public should promote better science and better decisions for Canada's offshore. As things stand today, the whole issue of 'public subsurface data' in Canada is, frankly, a mess.

### Matt Hall

I am a geoscientist in Nova Scotia, Canada. Founder of Agile Geoscience, co-founder of The HUB South Shore. Into geology, geophysics, programming in Python, and knowledge sharing (especially wikis).

# Deriving equations in Python

Last week I wrote about the elastic moduli, and showed the latest version of my table of equations. Here it is; click on it for a large version:

Making this grid was a bit of an exercise in itself. One could spend some happy hours rearranging things by hand; instead, I spent some (mostly) happy hours learning to use SymPy, a symbolic maths library for Python. For what it's worth, you can see my flailing in this Jupyter Notebook. Warning: it's pretty untidy.

### Wrangling equations

Fortunately, SymPy is easy to get started with. Let's look at getting an expression for $$V_\mathrm{P}$$ in terms of $$E$$ and $$K$$, given that I already have an expression in terms of $$E$$ and $$\mu$$, plus an expression for $$\mu$$ in terms of $$E$$ and $$K$$.

First we import the SymPy library, set it up for nice math display in the Notebook, and initialize some parameter names:

>>> import sympy
>>> sympy.init_printing(use_latex='mathjax')
>>> lamda, mu, nu, E, K, rho = sympy.symbols("lamda, mu, nu, E, K, rho")

lamda is not a typo: lambda means something else in Python — it's a sort of unnamed function.

Now we're ready to define an expression. First, I'll import SymPy's own square root function for convenience. Then I define an expression for $$V_\mathrm{P}$$ in terms of $$E$$ and $$\mu$$:

>>> vp_expr = sympy.sqrt((mu * (E - 4*mu)) / (rho * (E - 3*mu)))
>>> vp_expr

$$\sqrt{\frac{\mu \left(E - 4 \mu\right)}{\rho \left(E - 3 \mu\right)}}$$

Now we can give SymPy the expression for $$\mu$$ in terms of $$E$$ and $$K$$ and substitute:

>>> mu_expr = (3 * K * E) / (9 * K - E)
>>> vp_new = vp_expr.subs(mu, mu_expr)
>>> vp_new

$$\sqrt{3} \sqrt{\frac{E K \left(- \frac{12 E K}{- E + 9 K} + E\right)}{\rho \left(- E + 9 K\right) \left(- \frac{9 E K}{- E + 9 K} + E\right)}}$$

Argh, what is that?? Luckily, it's easy to simplify:

>>> sympy.simplify(vp_new)

$$\sqrt{3} \sqrt{\frac{K \left(E + 3 K\right)}{\rho \left(- E + 9 K\right)}}$$

That's more like it! What's really cool is that SymPy can even generate the $$\LaTeX$$ code for your favourite math renderer:

>>> print(sympy.latex(sympy.simplify(vp_new)))
\sqrt{3} \sqrt{\frac{K \left(E + 3 K\right)}{\rho \left(- E + 9 K\right)}}

That's all there is to it!

### What is the mystery X?

Have a look at the expression for  $$V_\mathrm{P}$$ in terms of $$E$$ and $$\lambda$$:

$$\frac{\sqrt{2}}{2} \sqrt{\frac{1}{\rho} \left(E - \lambda + \sqrt{E^{2} + 2 E \lambda + 9 \lambda^{2}}\right)}$$

I find this quantity — I call it $$X$$ in the big table of equations — really curious:

$$X = \sqrt{9\lambda^2 + 2E\lambda + E^2}$$

As you can see from the similar table on Wikipedia, a similar quantity appears in expressions in terms of $$E$$ and $$M$$. These quantities look like elastic moduli, and even have the right units and order of magnitude as the others. If anyone has thoughts on what significance it might have, if any, or on why expressions in terms of $$E$$ and $$\lambda$$ or $$M$$ should be so uncommonly clunky, I'm all ears.

One last thing... I've mentioned Melvyn Bragg's wonderful BBC radio programme In Our Time before. If you like listening to the radio, try this recent episode on the life and work of Robert Hooke. Not only did he invent the study of elasticity with his eponymous law, he was also big in microscopy, describing things like the cellular structure of cork in detail (right).

### Matt Hall

I am a geoscientist in Nova Scotia, Canada. Founder of Agile Geoscience, co-founder of The HUB South Shore. Into geology, geophysics, programming in Python, and knowledge sharing (especially wikis).

# All the elastic moduli

An elastic modulus is the ratio of stress (pressure) to strain (deformation) in an isotropic, homogeneous elastic material:

$$\mathrm{modulus} = \frac{\mathrm{stress}}{\mathrm{strain}}$$

### OK, what does that mean?

Elastic means what you think it means: you can deform it, and it springs back when you let go. Imagine stretching a block of rubber, like the picture here. If you measure the stress $$F/W^2$$ (i.e. the pressure is force per unit of cross-sectional area) and strain $$\Delta L/L$$ (the stretch as a proportion) along the direction of stretch ('longitudinally'), then the stress/strain ratio gives you Young's modulus, $$E$$.

Since strain is unitless, all the elastic moduli have units of pressure (pascals, Pa), and is usually on the order of tens of GPa (billions of pascals) for rocks.

The other elastic moduli are:

There's another quantity that doesn't fit our definition of a modulus, and doesn't have units of pressure — in fact it's unitless —  but is always lumped in with the others:

### What does this have to do with my data?

Interestingly, and usefully, the elastic properties of isotropic materials are described completely by any two moduli. This means that, given any two, we can compute all of the others. More usefully still, we can also relate them to $$V_\mathrm{P}$$, $$V_\mathrm{S}$$, and $$\rho$$. This is great because we can get at those properties easily via well logs and less easily via seismic data. So we have a direct path from routine data to the full suite of elastic properties.

The only way to measure the elastic moduli themselves is on a mechanical press in the laboratory. The rock sample can be subjected to confining pressures, then squeezed or stretched along one or more axes. There are two ways to get at the moduli:

1. Directly, via measurements of stress and strain, so called static conditions.
2. Indirectly, via sonic measurements and the density of the sample. Because of the oscillatory and transient nature of the sonic pulses, we call these dynamic measurements. In principle, these should be the most comparable to the measurements we make from well logs or seismic data.

### Let's see the equations then

The elegance of the relationships varies quite a bit. Shear modulus $$\mu$$ is just $$\rho V_\mathrm{S}^2$$, but Young's modulus is not so pretty:

$$E = \frac{\rho V_\mathrm{S}^2 (3 V_\mathrm{P}^2 - 4 V_\mathrm{S}^2 }{V_\mathrm{P}^2 - V_\mathrm{S}^2}$$

You can see most of the other relationships in this big giant grid I've been slowly chipping away at for ages. Some of it is shown below. It doesn't have most of the P-wave modulus expressions, because no-one seems too bothered about P-wave modulus, despite its obvious resemblance to acoustic impedance. They are in the version on Wikipedia, however (but it lacks the $$V_\mathrm{P}$$ and $$V_\mathrm{S}$$ expressions).

Some of the expressions for the elastic moduli and velocities — click the image to see them all in SubSurfWiki.

In this table, the mysterious quantity $$X$$ is given by:

$$X = \sqrt{9\lambda^2 + 2E\lambda + E^2}$$

In the next post, I'll come back to this grid and tell you how I've been deriving all these equations using Python.

Top tip... To find more posts on rock physics, click the Rock Physics tag below!

Comment

### Matt Hall

I am a geoscientist in Nova Scotia, Canada. Founder of Agile Geoscience, co-founder of The HUB South Shore. Into geology, geophysics, programming in Python, and knowledge sharing (especially wikis).

# Pick This again, again

Today we're proud to be launching the latest, all new iteration of Pick This!

Last June I told you about some new features we'd added to our social image interpretation tool. This new release is not really about features, but more about architecture. Late in 2015, we were challenged by BG Group, a UK energy company, to port the app to Amazon's cloud (AWS), so that they could run it in their own environment. Once we'd done that, we brought the data over from Google — where it was hosted — and set up the new public site on AWS. It will be much easier for us to add new features to this version.

One notable feature is that you no longer have to have a Google account to log in! This may have been a show-stopper for some people.

The app has been completely re-written from scratch, so there are a few differences. But fundamentally it's the same as before — you can ask your peers questions about images, and they can draw their answers. For example, Don Herron's "Where's the unconformity?" now has over 450 interpretations!

As we improve the tool over the coming weeks, we'll add ways to filter the results down, to attenuate some of the 'interpretation noise'. It's interesting to think about ways to represent this result — what is the 'true interpretation'? Is it the cloud of all opinions? Is there one answer?

Click here to visit the new site. For now it only plays nicely on a desktop computer (mobile is such a headache, but we will get there!). But you should be able to log in, interpret images, and upload new ones. You can let me know about bugs, or tweet @nowpickthis. If you like it, and I really hope you do, please tell your friends!

A quick reminder about the hackathon in Vienna next month. It will be an intense weekend of learning about programming and building some fun projects. I hope you can come, and if you know any geos in central Europe, please let them know!

Comment

### Matt Hall

I am a geoscientist in Nova Scotia, Canada. Founder of Agile Geoscience, co-founder of The HUB South Shore. Into geology, geophysics, programming in Python, and knowledge sharing (especially wikis).

# Why Python beats MATLAB for geophysics

MATLAB — the scientific computing environment which includes a programming language — is amazing. It has probably done as much for the development of new geophysical methods, and for the teaching and learning of geophysics, as any other tool or language. A purely anecdotal assertion, but it's rare to meet a geophysicist who has not at least dabbled in MATLAB, and it is used daily in geophysics labs and classrooms. Geophysics <3 MATLAB.

It's easy to see why — MATLAB definitely has some advantages.

• Matrices. MATLAB implicitly treats arrays as matrices (the name means 'matrix laboratory'). As a result, notation is quite intuitive for mathematicians. For example, a*b means standard matrix multiplication, the dot product. (Slightly confusingly, to get Python-style element-wise multiplication, add a dot: a.*b).
• Lots of functions. MATLAB has been around for over 30 years, so there are many, many useful functions. Find them either in the core product, in one of the toolboxes, or in MATLAB Central.
• Simulink. This block-based system design and simulation engine is much-loved by engineers. It allows users to model physical systems in an intuitive, graphical environment.
• Easy to install. The MATLAB environment is a desktop application, so it is instantly familiar and can be managed under the same processes other software in your machine or organization is managed.
• MATLAB is widespread in academia. Thanks to one of those generous schemes where software corporations give free software to universities, just because they're awesome and definitely not for any other reason, students and profs have easy and free access to MATLAB. Outside academia, however, you're looking at tens of thousands of dollars.

So far so good, but it's time for geophysics to switch to Python. On the face of it, the language has a lot in common with MATLAB: they're both easy to learn, and both have broad ecosystems that make things like image processing, statistics, and signal processing easy. But Python has some special features that make it a fantastic platform for scientific computing...

• Free and open. Thanks to one of those generous schemes where people make software and let anyone use it for any purpose for free, Python is free! Not only is it free of charge, you are free to inspect and modify the code. Open is awesome. (There are other free alternatives to MATLAB, notably GNU Octave and SciLab.)
• General purpose. One of the things I love about Python is its flexibility. You can use it in the shell on microtasks, or interactively, or in scripts, or to write server software, or to build enterprise software with GUIs.
• Namespaces. Everything in MATLAB lives in the main namespace, whereas Python keeps things inherently modular. To access NumPy, say, you have to import it and then use its namespace to get at its contents: numpy.ndarray([1, 2, 3]). This has various advantages, including flexibility, readability, learnability, and portability.
• Introspection. A powerful idea in Python, introspection means that you (or your code) can see inside every module, class, and function. You can use access private variables, or write code that 'knows' about other objects' interfaces.
• Portable. You can run your Python code on any architecture, whereas to run MATLAB code you either need all the MATLAB licenses the software uses, or another pricey toolbox to make executables.
• Popular. Python is the 7th most popular tag in Stack Overflow, whereas MATLAB is the 58th. While programming is not a popularity contest, think of your career, or the careers of your students. Once they graduate, Python will serve them better than MATLAB. There are over 300 jobs for Pythonistas on Stack Overflow Jobs right now. MATLAB jobs? Nine.

So there you have it. It's time to switch to Python. If you're new to programming, there's no contest. I suppose if you're productive in MATLAB, and have access to all the toolboxes, then admittedly it's hard to say you should switch.

But I'll still say it.

I was inspired to write this post after talking to a geophysicist about using programming languages in the classroom, and by the lists in this nice post on pyzo.org. It would be interesting to hear what you use in the classroom — as an instructor or as a student. I know geophysics is being taught with the help of MATLAB (in many places), Java (e.g. at Colorado School of Mines), Mathematica (e.g. by Chris Liner). I wonder if there's anyone using JavaScript, which wouldn't be a terrible choice. Or C++? Or Fortran?? Let us know in the comments!

### Matt Hall

I am a geoscientist in Nova Scotia, Canada. Founder of Agile Geoscience, co-founder of The HUB South Shore. Into geology, geophysics, programming in Python, and knowledge sharing (especially wikis).

Ah, the smell of a new seismic interpretation project. All those traces, all that geology — perhaps unseen by humans or indeed any multicellular organism at all since the Triassic. The temptation is to Just Start Interpreting, why, you could have a map by lunchtime tomorrow! But wait. There are some things to do first.

Once I've made sure all is present and correct (see How to QC a seismic volume), I spend a bit of time making some helpful horizons...

• The surface. One of the fundamental horizons, the seafloor or ground surface is a must-have. You may have received it from the processor (did you ask for it?) or it may be hidden in the SEG-Y headers — ask whoever received or loaded the data. If not, ground elevation is usually easy enough to get from your friendly GIS guru. If you have to interpret the seafloor, at least it should autotrack quite well.
• Seafloor multiple model. In marine data, I always make a seafloor multiple model — just multiply the seafloor pick by 2. This will help you make sense of any anomalous reflectors or amplitudes at that two-way time. Maybe make a 3× version too if things look really bad. Remember, the 2× multiple will be reverse polarity.
• Other multiples. You can model the surface multiple of any strong reflectors with the same arithmetic — but the chances are that any residual multiple energy is quite subtle. You may want to seek help modeling them properly, once you have a 3D velocity model.

• Water depth markers. I like to make flat horizons* at important water depths, eg shelf edge (usually about 100–200 m), plus 1000 m, 2000 m, etc. This mainly helps to keep track of where you are, and also to think about prospectivity, accessibility, well cost, etc. You only want these to exist in the water, so delete them anywhere they are deeper than the seafloor horizon. Your software should have an easy way to implement a simple model for time t in ms, given depth d in m and velocity** V in m/s, e.g.

$$t = \frac{2000 d}{V} \approx \frac{2000 d}{1490} \qquad \qquad \mathrm{e.g.}\ \frac{2000 \times 1000}{1490} = 1342\ \mathrm{ms}$$

• Hydrate stability zone. In marine data and in the Arctic you may want to model the bottom of the gas hydrate stability zone (GHSZ) to help interpret bottom-simulating reflectors, or BSRs. I usually do this by scanning the literature for reports of BSRs in the area, or data on hydrate encounters in wells. In the figure above, I just used the seafloor plus 400 ms. If you want to try for more precision, Bale et al. (2014) provided several models for computing the position of the GHSZ — thank you to Murray Hoggett at Birmingham for that tip.
• Fold. It's very useful to be able to see seismic fold on a map along with your data, so I like to load fold maps at some strategic depths or, better yet, load the entire fold volume. That way you can check that anomalies (especially semblance) don't have a simple, non-geological explanation.
• Gravity and magnetics. These datasets are often readily available. You will have to shift and scale them to some sensible numbers, either at the top or the bottom of your sections.  gravity can be especially useful for interpreting rifted margins.
• Important boundaries. Your software may display these for you, but if not, you can fake it. Simply make a horizon that only exists within the polygon — a lease boundary perhaps — by interpolating within a polygon. Make this horizon flat and deep (deeper than the seismic), then merge it with a horizon that is flat and shallow (–1 ms, or anything shallower than the seismic). You should end up with almost-vertical lines at the edges of the feature.
• Section headings. I like to organize horizons into groups — stratigraphy, attributes, models, markers, etc. I make empty horizons to act only as headings so I can see at a glance what's going on. Whether you need do this, and how you achieve it, depends on your software.

Most of these horizons don't take long to make, and I promise you'll find uses for them throughout the interpretation project.

Footnotes

* It's not always obvious how to make a flat horizon. A quick way is to take some ubiquitous horizon — the seafloor maybe — and multiplying it by zero.

** The velocity of sound in seawater is not a simple subject. If you want to be precise about it, you can try this online calculator, or implement the equations yourself.

The 2D seismic dataset shown is from the Laurentian Basin, offshore Newfoundland. The dataset is copyright of Natural Resources Canada, and subject to the Open Government License – Canada. You can download it from the OpendTect Open Seismic Repository. The cultural boundary and gravity data is fictitious — I made them up for the purposes of illustration.

References

Bale, Sean, Tiago M. Alves, Gregory F. Moore (2014). Distribution of gas hydrates on continental margins by means of a mathematical envelope: A method applied to the interpretation of 3D seismic data. Geochem. Geophys. Geosyst. 15, 52–68, doi:10.1002/2013GC004938. Note: the equations are in the Supporting Information.

### Matt Hall

I am a geoscientist in Nova Scotia, Canada. Founder of Agile Geoscience, co-founder of The HUB South Shore. Into geology, geophysics, programming in Python, and knowledge sharing (especially wikis).

# Toolbox wishlist

Earlier this week, the conversation on Software Underground* turned to well-tie software.

Someone was complaining that, despite having several well-tie tools at their disposal, none of them was quite right. I've written about this phenomenon before. We, as a discipline, do not know how to tie wells. I don't mean that you don't know, I know you know, but I bet if you compared the workflows of ten geoscientists, they would all be different. That's why every legacy well in every project has thirty time-depth tables, including at least three endearingly hopeful ones called final, and the one everyone uses, called test.

As a result of all this, the topic of "what tools do people need?" came up. Leo Uieda, a researcher in Brazil, asked:

I just about remembered that I had put up this very question on Tricider some time ago. Tricider is not a website about apple-based beverages, but a site for sharing and voting on ideas. You can start with a few ideas, get votes and comments on them, and even get new ideas. Here's the top idea as of right now: an open-source petrophysics tool.

Do check out the list, and vote or comment if you like. It might help someone find a project to work on, or spark an idea for a new app or even a new company.

Another result of the well-tie software conversation was, "What are the features of the one well-tie app to rule them all?" I'll leave you to stew on that one for a while. Meanwhile, please share your thoughts in the comments.

* Software Underground is an open Slack team. In essence, it's a chat room for geocomputing geeks: software, underground, geddit? It's completely free and open to anyone — pop along to http://swung.rocks/ to sign up.

It even has its own radio station!

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### Matt Hall

I am a geoscientist in Nova Scotia, Canada. Founder of Agile Geoscience, co-founder of The HUB South Shore. Into geology, geophysics, programming in Python, and knowledge sharing (especially wikis).