Foundation Models for Geophysics: Review and Perspective

TL;DR

This paper reviews the development and potential of foundation models in exploration geophysics, emphasizing their ability to generalize across diverse geophysical data and tasks, and discusses future research directions and challenges.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of GeoFMs, including their development, hierarchy, applications, workflow, and challenges, highlighting their transformative potential in exploration geophysics.

Findings

Foundation models can generalize across various geophysical data types.

GeoFMs have potential to revolutionize exploration geophysics workflows.

Identifies key challenges and future trends in developing GeoFMs.

Abstract

Recently, large models, or foundation models, have exhibited remarkable performance, profoundly impacting research paradigms in diverse domains. Foundation models, trained on extensive and diverse datasets, provide exceptional generalization abilities, allowing for their straightforward application across various use cases and domains. Exploration geophysics is the study of the Earth's subsurface to find natural resources and help with environmental and engineering projects. It uses methods like analyzing seismic, magnetic, and electromagnetic data, which presents unique challenges and opportunities for the development of geophysical foundation models (GeoFMs). This perspective explores the potential applications and future research directions of GeoFMs in exploration geophysics. We also review the development of foundation models, including large language models, large vision models, and large multimodal models, as well as their advancement in the field of geophysics. Furthermore, we discuss the hierarchy of GeoFMs for exploration geophysics and the critical techniques employed, providing a foundational research workflow for their development. Lastly, we summarize the challenges faced in developing GeoFMs, along with future trends and their potential impact on the field. In conclusion, this perspective provides a comprehensive overview of the development, hierarchy, applications, development workflow, and challenges of foundation models, highlighting their transformative potential in advancing exploration geophysics.