Bio: Peter is a founder of Ocean Floor Geophysics. He has a background in mining geophysics and extensive experience in mineral exploration worldwide. Prior to starting OFG, he was chief geophysicist for Placer Dome, the second largest gold mining company in the world, at that time. Peter has a strong background in electrical, magnetic, and electromagnetic potential field methods used in mineral exploration and in the economic evaluation of mineral deposits.
Abstract: Subsea cables can be divided into several classes – DC Power, AC Power, or communication with or without repeaters. Their magnetic signatures can be quite strong and they are distinct. There is considerable incentive to measure the depth of burial of AC power cables; they can overheat if buried too deeply, and are susceptible to damage if buried too shallowly. The magnetic signature measured when using a vector magnetometer is different from that seen using a total field magnetometer and extra information can be extracted using a vector magnetometer. The measurement of electric fields around subsea cables is not typical, but this can provide complementary and quite useful information, particularly when looking for faults. A brief discussion of theory and some example data collected during surveys is presented. Examples of data collected using an active seafloor following tow-fish (ROTV) and using an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) are shown. An example illustrating how the depth of burial over an AC power cable can be readily measured using a high speed vector magnetometer is presented.
Speaker: Andy Dyke, Business Development Manager, HiSeis
Title: Recent Technical Advances in Seismic for Hard Rock Mineral Systems
Date: Wednesday, October 19, 2022
Time: 4:30pm to 5:30pm PST
Locations: This talk will be held both in-person and virtually via Zoom.
In-person: Room 111, 409 Granville St. Vancouver BC, V6C 1T2
Virtual: Via Zoom. Link will be distributed via our newsletter prior to the talk.
Bio: Andy left Leeds University, UK in 1988, with a BSc (Hons) in Geological Sciences and an urge to travel and see the world. Geophysics and specifically seismic technology as an exploration method was the natural fit to satisfy his thirst for global adventure.
Andy spent 24 years with Schlumberger, enjoying postings in the UK, Libya, South Africa, USA, Venezuela, Australia and not forgetting Canada. After this he spent 5 years with TGS Canada in a variety of offshore and onshore multi-client project development roles.
Andy is currently the North American Business Development Manager with HiSeis, a hard rock seismic specialist company, with HQ in Perth, Australia.
HiSeis are striving to showcase hard rock seismic technology to the North American mining market and Andy is currently accomplishing this from Calgary, Alberta. Seismic is an underutilized tool in the mineral exploration space and Andy is focused on helping hard rock explorationists both understand and utilize its unprecedented benefits.
Abstract: Seismic for hard rock imaging of the subsurface has changed since you tried it last time or heard about it last time or maybe (for you) there wasn’t even a last time. The aim of my talk will be to explain what has and what is changing both from a design and acquisition standpoint and the types of products that can be extracted from new and vintage seismic datasets alike. I will show examples of the following 5 key talking points from the HiSeis’ portfolio of 100+ worldwide projects.
Design – Feasibility and Modeling for de-risking new seismic surveys.
Acquisition – Efficiency, Footprint and Cost reduction in Canada
Processing – Improving shallow resolution and steep reflector imaging using recently developed Depth Imaging workflows.
Interpretation – Automated Fault modeling with ML & Geobody modeling identifying geological features not picked up easily by the human eye.
Rock Properties – Geostatistical Inversion – combining seismic and drilling to go beyond just reflective boundaries and provide key lithology probability outputs.
I believe that the surface seismic technique has a significant future in BC for aiding exploration, ore definition, drill targeting and mine planning. By the end of my talk I hope the examples I have shared will have shown you why
Webinar: A recording of this webinar is available on our Youtube channel.
Speaker: Dr. Seogi Kang, Postdoc Researcher, Stanford University.
Title: Time-lapse inversion of airborne electromagnetic data for monitoring saltwater intrusion
Date: Wed, September 28, 2022
Time: 5:00pm to 6:00pm PST
Locations: This talk will be held both in-person and virtually via Zoom.
In-person: Room 111, 409 Granville St. Vancouver BC, V6C 1T2
Virtual: via Zoom Link will be distributed via our newsletter prior to the talk.
Bio: Dr. Kang completed his PhD in Geophysics at University of British Columbia, Canada, in 2018. His thesis work focused on computational electromagnetics and its application to mining problems. Currently, he is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Geophysics Department at Stanford. His current research focus is on maximizing the value of electromagnetic imaging for groundwater management and science. He is a co-creator of an open-source geophysical software, SimPEG.
Abstract: In coastal areas, half of the population lives and 75% of the cities are located. Groundwater is a major source of freshwater in these coastal. Increased water demand with the population growth causes more pumping of groundwater. Climate change causes sea level rise. Net effect of these is increased saltwater intrusion threatening the freshwater security in coastal regions. Due to the close connection between salinity and electrical resistivity (or conductivity), electromagnetic (EM) geophysics can play a critical role by imaging saltwater intrusion. A specific form of the EM geophysics used in this study is the airborne EM (AEM) method, which can rapidly map out subsurface resistivity of a large coastal region. While there are many AEM experiments for imaging subsurface hydrogeology, conducting time-lapse AEM experiments is not common due to the relatively expensive cost the survey as well as the repeatability issues. Further, there is yet no implementation of time-lapse inversion for AEM data, which simultaneously invert multiple AEM data sets with a constraint along a time dimension. Working with the two AEM data sets acquired in 2017 and 2019 at the Northern Salinas Valley of California, USA, in this study, we developed a novel time-lapse inversion approach using an Lp-norm for the spatial and temporal constraints. Three different types of inversion were conducted: 1) Separate inversions with L2-norm constraints; 2) Time-lapse inversion with L2-norm constraints; 3) Time-lapse inversion with L0-norm constraints. From inversion results, we found that the time constraint played an important role for minimizing the inversion artifacts in the conductivity difference between resistivity models at 2017 and 2019. We also found that the use of L0-norm for both spatial and time constraints provided the most confident estimate of the conductivity difference due to the sparse nature of the implemented L0-norms. The final conductivity difference from the time-lapse inversion with L0-norm was compared with salinity contours from in-situ measurements.
Webinar: A recording of this webinar is available on our Youtube channel.
The BC Geophysical Society is excited to announce our upcoming 2022 Workshop “Drones in Geoscience”.
This workshop offers a start-of-the-art examination of where the use of drones is now and where it is headed in the future in applied geoscience, and especially applied geophysics. The first day will consist of lectures and presentations from experts in drone fabrication and from service providers discussing how drones are used. The second day will be at a local outdoor facility where attendees will witness advanced and innovative drones in flight.
Our keynote speaker will be Ron Bell, Senior geoDRONEologist and Geophysicist. His talk will be titled “The Elegance of Drone Geoscience”.
During Thursday’s technical session, companies who will be demonstrating on Friday will be display booths set up. This will be a great opportunity to see the drones and discuss the technology up close.
We are currently looking for volunteers to assist with setup/cleanup on Friday. In exchange we are offering free attendance to the workshop.
Thursday May 12, 2022 – Lectures & Presentations Friday May 13, 2022 – Live Field Demonstrations
Times:
Thursday: 8:15am to 5:00pm Friday: 9:30am to 4:30pm
Registration:
Cost: – Two Day Non-Member Price $250 – Two Day BCGS Member Price $230 – Two Day Student Price $20 – One Day (Thur only or Friday only) Price $180 – One Day Virtual (Thur only) Price $75 Registration payment link is below
Locations:
Thursday: SFU Harbour Centre, Fletcher Challenge Theatre (Room 1900) 515 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, BC, V6B 5K3
Moose Down Under 830 W Pender St, Vancouver, BC V6C 1J8
Friday: Burnaby Lake Sports Complex – East: Fields 3-6 3520 Sperling Ave, Burnaby, BC V5B 4Z6 **Access directions below
Please register in advance of the symposium. Your registration is guaranteed once payment has been received. The attendee name must be entered for registration to be complete. Confirmed speakers and demonstrators do not need to register. If you need to register multiple attendees at once, please email info@bcgsonline.org. Payment will be processed by Paypal and can be paid using a credit card, debit card, or a Paypal account.
Current paid 2022 BCGS members are able to register at the BCGS member rate for the two-day event. Other attendees must use the standard industry rate.
We have added a virtual registration option to participate in the Thursday lectures via Zoom.
Thank you to everyone who attended, both in-person and virtually. Your support is appreciated.
Sponsors:
Speakers:
Ron Bell, Drone Geoscience, LLC The Elegance of Drone Geoscience
Jan Franke, Groundradar Inc. Challenges and Opportunities of Drone GPR
Alan Chapman, NAV Canada Drones and the Airspace: Current Operations and Future Needs
Ian Wills, Coastal Drone How I learned to love the RPAS; or Flying Drones Legally and Safely in Canada
Steve Donovan, Beyond Visual Light of Sight Innovation Centre (BVLOS InC) VLOS to BVLOS Protocols, Challenges and Solutions
Nicolas Martin-Burtart, Radiation Solutions Inc. Radiometric data collected with an UAV: Pre-flight and post-processing
Travis Ferbey, Quaternary Geologist, British Columbia Geological Survey Can remotely piloted aircraft-borne radiometrics and magnetics detect dispersal trains in subglacial tills?
Zane White, Candrone Photogrammetry and LiDAR – The Facts and Myths About Modelling Our World in 3D via UAV
Michael Burns, Pioneer Exploration Lessons Learned in an Emerging Drone-Based Geophysics Industry
Rees Pillizzi, Measur Large Area UAV LiDAR Mapping: Trinity F90+ with Qube 240 LiDAR
Laura Quigley, Seequent UAV Geophysics Workflow for your Magnetometer Data
Eric Sazuk, BCIT Drone-based Gas Sniffing
Geoff Pettifer, Terra Entheos Geoscience NSG Inter-Society Committee on UAV Geophysics Guidelines and Standards – Drone Magnetic Guidelines
Demonstrators:
We have an exciting group of demonstrators who will be showing the latest and greatest in drone technology. Each of these companies will also have a display booth on Thursday.
Access to the Burnaby Lakes Sports Complex East, Fields 3 & 4, is easy by both vehicle and transit. Access to the parking lot is from Sperling Ave via Joe Sakic Way (Sprott St is currently closed due to construction).
Speaker: Lindsey Heagy, PhD. Assistant Professor, Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, UBC
Title: Geophysics in a changing climate
Date: Tuesday, February 1, 2022
Time: 7:30am – 9:00am PST
Location: Pearl Room, Fairmont Pacific Rim Hotel, 1038 Canada Place, Vancouver, BC, V6C 0B9
Abstract:
Geophysics in a changing climate Lindsey Heagy, PhD. Assistant Professor, Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, UBC
It is clear that the geosciences have an important role to play in working to understand and mitigate the societal impacts of the climate crisis. Locating critical minerals, monitoring geologic storage of CO2, managing groundwater, and characterizing changes to permafrost are all applications where geophysical data can provide insights. These applications raise interesting scientific questions about how to combine petrophysical, geologic, geochemical, and additional geophysical data sets to improve our ability to produce useful models of the subsurface. The next significant advancements will undoubtedly involve methodological improvements in inversions and machine learning, but importantly will require a more interdisciplinary approach, where the methods we design can be used to test and revise hypotheses specific to a given geologic context. The growth and adoption of open-source software and data standards is a positive step. Within the SimPEG community, we have seen many examples of how working in a modular, interoperable framework enables ideas to rapidly be prototyped and extended. Working in an open ecosystem allows us to more readily connect with methods in other fields, including geologic modelling and machine learning.
Although geophysics has an important role to play in mitigating climate change and its impacts, we are at risk of continuing to be a “field in decline.” Geosciences as a whole have a severe diversity problem, and with the strong association of geophysics with hydrocarbons deterring many students, we are missing out on the talents and ideas of many. In this talk, I look forward to opening up what I hope will be continuing discussions about growing our community and broadening the scientific and societal contributions we can make.
About the Speaker:
Lindsey Heagy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences at UBC. She completed her BSc in geophysics at the University of Alberta in 2012 and her PhD at UBC in 2018. Following her PhD, she was a Postdoctoral researcher in the Statistics Department at UC Berkeley. Her research aims to advance methods in geophysical inversions and machine learning for carbon sequestration, mineral exploration, groundwater, and environmental studies. She is a co-founder of the SimPEG and GeoSci.xyz projects which develop open source software and educational resources for geophysics. In 2019, she was awarded the Gerald W. Hohmann Outstanding Young Scientist for advances in simulation and inversion of electromagnetic data and promotion of an open source culture for collaborative, inclusive and reproducible research.
Recording:
A recording of this webinar is available on our YouTube channel.
