Serious concerns on Deep-time Digital Earth AI: “A scientific chatbot prohibiting certain questions because they may tarnish the image of a government, poses a serious risk to academic freedom of expression”.The development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the geosciences continues at pace. There is much to be positive about, but with AI comes a responsibility to ensure these powerful emerging tools are... Continue Reading →

Subsurface Data: New foresight report from the UK Government Office for Science. The subsurface is a space much the same as the above ground whose use needs to be monitored, planned, and managed. But the data, technologies, and policy tools needed for this lag behind those available for the surface.Quotes on data include: "Evidence gathered... Continue Reading →

Geological AI: New open-source tool for scanning grains of sand. A convolutional neural network (CNN) was trained by researchers at Stanford on hundreds of electron microscope images of sand grains to determine the depositional environment. This represented material from different geological ages and locations, terrestrial environments fluvial (rivers and streams), eolian (windblown sediments, such as... Continue Reading →

I always find it interesting how someone not involved in geology or AI perceives the rather technical descriptions of what its about and communicates it to those not familiar with the area. This was written below by the King's Award Network from my rather technical jargon! This 'icebreaker' was sent out as an email within... Continue Reading →

DeLVE into Earth’s Past: A Visualization-Based Exhibit Deployed Across Multiple Museum Contexts. An interactive visualisation of geological deep time used to improve museum visitors perception of deep-time. I found it an exciting concept and use of visualisation.I've placed a link to the paper and video, Solen et al (2024) from the University of British Columbia,... Continue Reading →

I provided input to this interesting article written by Clarissa Wright in the Energy Voice E-FWD recently. The more subsurface and geoscience data we can use in the pre-permit and planning phase of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) projects, the more likely we are to reduce uncertainties to support policy and investment decision making. Where... Continue Reading →

Honoured to be a guest on a podcast with Ashleigh Faith recently. Ashleigh has been an inspiring communicator on information semantics for many years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3TNmYj4y-I

Back in June 2024 I authored an online article on serious concerns for potential state censorship, copyright infringement and lack of transparency in the Deep-time Digital Earth (DDE) Project's AI Chatbot GeoGPT. This has now been published in the autumn edition of the Geoscientist magazine from the Geological Society of London. A reply from the... Continue Reading →