MIT Earth Resources Laboratory presents Tarje Nissen-Meyer, Associate Professor at Oxford, on "Complexity-adaptive seismology: measurements, modeling, and inference from elephants to Mars."

(Based on work by Tarje Nissen-Meyer, Ben Moseley, Claudia Haindl, Will Eaton, Alex Szenicer, and Kuangdai Leng.)

"Deciphering the ubiquitous vibroscape is the heart of seismology. The divide-and-conquer approach to extract information from complex data (e.g. traveltimes) served as a foundation for much geophysical insight across all scales and applications, but the advent of massive datasets and computational resources now opens doors to understanding a truly multi-scale, multi-modal Earth system – even just within the linear regime of elastodynamic wave propagation. Aided by complexity-adaptive numerical modeling, deep learning and waveform-complexity metrics, we will attempt to peek into this rich seismic world beyond. We will assess our AxiSEM3D technique against computational complexity with wavefields around salt domes and the deep mantle, entropy measures of waveform complexity in the context of scattering regimes on Earth and Mars, deep-learning techniques for accelerated modelling, and discriminate seismic signals from the savanna by machine learning."

 After (geo)physics MSc (Munich) and PhD (Princeton, under the late Tony Dahlen), Prof. Nissen-Meyer  was a postdoc at Caltech and Princeton with Jeroen Tromp, before moving to ETH Zurich as a senior scientist from 2010-2013. Since then he has been Associate Professor of Geophysics at Oxford, and spent a pandemically deprecated sabbatical at Stanford. Passionate about open science and multidisciplinary collaborations, he enjoys research across the scales, from fundamental wave physics to fieldwork and societal relevance, and hopes seismology can contribute to resolving some of our major problems.