11 February - International Day of Women and Girls in Science 

In recognition of the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, CGF hosted a gathering to celebrate the contributions of women in STEM and for some discussion on both progress and remaining challenges.

The discussion covered visibility, representation, and inclusion in science, both in general and through experiences shared by participants. Mentorship and role models were highlighted as key factors in encouraging women to pursue careers in science, both through early exposure and personal experiences that showed how encouragement and visibility build confidence and motivation.

Practical challenges, such as fieldwork logistics and gendered stereotypes, were discussed, emphasizing the value of open conversations to bring less obvious issues to light. The benefits of diverse perspectives in making scientific work more engaging and creative were also highlighted.

Finally, the conversation focused on outreach and representation, considering how to ensure visibility efforts without adding extra burdens on women, as well as CGF’s role in these efforts.

10 January - Best PhD award 

Our PostDoc Kasper Hunnestad received this week the Best PhD award from the Faculty of Natural Sciences at NTNU. His pioneering experimental work was published in Nature Communications, and he is also among five finalists for an European Award within Condensed Matter Physics at the international conference for German physical Society in 2025. 

Read more about the award here! 

29 November - New book out on the Energy Transition, co-edited by CGF Director

We are delighted to announce the publication of a new book on 'Geophysics and the Energy Transition', just been released by Elsevier, with a chapter from CGF and co-edited by our Director, Martin Landrø.

Geophysics and the Energy Transition has four sections:

1. What is the Energy Transition and why storage so important;
2. Selecting sites for storage;
3. Advanced monitoring technology; and
4. Moving forward to integrating Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) within the Energy Transition.

The Editors are Malcolm Wilson, Tom Davis and Martin Landro.  The book is in English and is available both in paperback (ISBN: 9780323959414) and as an eBook (ISBN: 9780323959421).

13 November - Sensnet Analytics awarded "Fremtidens Verdiskaper 2024"

Sensnet Analytics, a spin-off company from CGF, was awarded “Fremtidens Verdiskaper 2024” at the Sparebank1 event “Næringsdriv”. This prestigious recognition comes with a prize of 500,000 NOK and is meant as an inspiration for early-stage startups in Mid-Norway. Their five-minute pitch, delivered by Jan Langhammer and Robin Rørstadbotnen, demonstrated innovative examples of using Distributed Acoustic Sensing for power companies and highlighted other potential purposes.

Congratulation to Sensnet Analytics for this achievement!

12 November - Visit from SAT 

CGF had the pleasure of welcoming a group of scholars from the "Scholars at Risk" (SAT) program during their visit to NTNU. The scholars, currently studying at universities across Norway, represent a range of countries – including Afghanistan, Ukraine, Palestine, Myanmar, Turkey and Syria, and bring backgrounds from various academic disciplines. During their visit, they were introduced to a variety of CGF’s activities and demonstrated particular interest in the Centre’s research on landslides, earthquakes, and urban monitoring. Their engagement highlights how CGF’s topics resonate with such an academically broad group of students.

05 November - CGF has a booth at EAGE Global Energy Transition (GET2024)

CGF is excited to have a stand at the EAGE Global Energy Transition (GET2024) Conference in Rotterdam Tuesday-Thursday, where we are showcasing CGF’s activites, especially within CO2 storage and monitoring.

Please stop by and talk to us!

16 October - Lifetime Achievement Award to Phil Ringrose

Lifetime Achievement Awards to Prof. Phil Ringrose

The Carbon Capture and Storage Association - the lead European association for accelerating the commercial deployment of carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS), presented two Lifetime Achievement Awards at their annual meeting in London 14-16 October.  The awards were presented to presented to Alan James, Founder & Advisor, Storegga and Philip Ringrose, Professor, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), and former geoscience specialist at Equinor.

In presenting the awards, CEO Olivia Powis, explained that the CCSA was honouring ‘decades-long commitment to accelerating the deployment of CCUS in the UK and Europe’ Coincidentally the UK Government recently confirmed a 21 Billion pound investment into the ‘Track 1 Decarbonisation projects’ in the UK, so there was a real mood at the CCSA conference of finally reaching the deployment stage for this technology.

15 October - CGF groundbreaking publication cited on BBC news website

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) recently cited CGF work on DAS marine acoustic detection in an online news article.  The BBC cited a CGF Nature Scientific Reports article as the key publication supporting the claim that today, telecommunication cables can be used as "acoustic sensors" to detect whales, ships, storms and earthquakes in the high seas.

Image adapted from online article by the BBC

11 October - CGF data acquisition at Iceland

CGF has launched a data acquisition campaign at Iceland in cooperation with the University of Iceland and Farice. The purpose is to monitor whales and earthquakes using two fibre optic cables offshore Iceland and one fibre connecting Reykjavik and Selfos. The plan is to finalise the DAS experiment next week and then CGF researchers will get access to data for several weeks for analysis. Robin Rørstadbotnen has been responsible for installing three DAS interrogators at Iceland with assistance from Ljosleidarinn (on-shore fibre) and Farice (offshore fibres). 

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30 September  - Introducing new arrival at CGF! 

​ Jon graduated with a Master of Science in Engineering from NTNU in Computer Science, specialising in computers and algorithms. His thesis focused on optimising the SVD with application to DAS-data for real time noise removal using established HPC SVD-solvers, sampling (Randomised SVD), and Autotuning using an Evolutionary Algorithm. His thesis was a collaboration between CGF partner ASN and the HPC-lab. For his PhD, he will continue working with geophysical forecasting, however he will pivot more towards AI-centric methods for solving challenges. 

27 August - Guest researcher visit 

In August we had the pleasure of hosting Anthony Sladen from CNRS in Nice for a month long stay at CGF. Anthony has long experience from working on various projects related to use of Distributed Acoustic Sensing, and this gave CGF researchers a unique opportunity to discuss several issues related to analysis and practical use of DAS data. Anthony gave talks and visited with our partner ASN during his stay in Trondheim. He is also involved in the newly started EU Seasounds projects, where the research focus is on characterisation and mitigation of sea noise pollution, which also involves several researchers from CGF. 

18 August - Welcoming new arrivals at CGF! 

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Chloé previously completed a geo-engineering Master's degree, where she discovered her interest in geophysics and desire to pursue doctoral studies. Her Master's thesis was on the subject of coupled hydrogephysical inversion to characterise transport properties of polluted aquifers in Denmark. Chloé joins CGF as part of WP2 CO2 and gas/energy storage. The topic of her PhD is related to CO2 storage and consists in getting insights into natural C02 emissions and their correlateion with tectonics in the North Atlantic region using multi-scale analysis of geophysical data. 

Tora holds a Bachelor's and a Master's degree in geophysics from the University of Bergen, where she specialised in seismic waveform modelling and inversion. Her Master's thesis, titled "Elastic Imaging and Full Waveform Inversion for Carbon Sequestration", demonstrated the applicability of elastic ray-Born modelling in multiparameter imaging and reflection waveform inversion for C02 monitoring. With two years of experience at Aker BP in seismic reservoir characterisation and seismic processing and imaging, Tora now joins CGF as part of WP7 Deep Earth Imaging. Her PhD work will focus on advancing elastic FWI methodologies, using active and passive data from OBNs and DAS for subsurface imaging. 

10 June - Desiderius Erasmus Award winner 

CGF researcher Prof. Phil Ringrose (left) was one of five awardees at the recent EAGE Annual Conference in Oslo on 10-13th June 2024. Phil received the prestigious Desiderius Erasmus Award in recognition of his outstanding achievements in the field of CCS and reservoir modelling. Interestingly, our own Prof. Bjørn Ursin also received this award in 2008. 

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6 June - Visit from KIOST 

On the 6th of June, the CGF CO2 storage group was pleased to welcome a delegation from the Korea Institute of Ocean Science & Technology (KIOST) who are leading the Korea CCS priject on CCS site monitoring and risk assessment. The group was very pleased with the fact-finding tour - especially when they discovered one of us spoke Korean fluently! 

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20 May - Celebrating the fruits of our students' labours!

​​​With the arrival of spring and some wonderful weather in Trondheim, looking already more like summer, we are pleased to share that several CGF researchers and their collaborators have published a fine crop of Journal papers in the early months of 2024.  It is really encouraging to see all that hard research work ‘blossoming’ into high quality Journal papers! Congratulations to the following!

• Ben Qin, Chenyang Ye, Jingao Liu, Shichun Huang, Shunguo Wang and J. ZhangZhou. (2024) Mapping Global Lithospheric Mantle Pressure-Temperature Conditions by Machine-Learning Thermobarometry. Geophysical Research Letters
• Kittinat Taweesintananon, Robin André Rørstadbotnen, Martin Landrø, Ståle Emil Johansen, Børge Arntsen, Matthias Forwick, and Alfred Hanssen. (2024) Near-surface characterization using shear-wave resonances: A case study from offshore Svalbard, Norway (seg.org) Geophysics.
• Kittinat Taweesintananon, Martin Landrø, Sirikarn Narongsirikul and Per Gunnar Folstad. (2024). Angle-dependent 4D seismic time-strain inversion for estimating subsurface thickness and velocity changes | GEOPHYSICS (seg.org)
• Kristoffer Galtung and Alexey Stovas. (2024) Diving Waves in Acoustic Factorized Orthorhombic Media. Accepted in Geophysical Prospecting
• Mina Spremic, Jo, Eidsvik and Per Åge Avseth. (2024) Bayesian rock-physics inversion using a localized ensemble-based approach — With an application to the Alvheim field. Geophysics, 89 (2)
• Ricardo Martinez, Vetle Vinje, Alexey Stovas, Joachim Mispel, Philip Ringrose, Kenneth Duffaut and Martin Landrø. (2024) Diving-wave time-lapse delay for CO2 thin layer detection. Geophysical Journal International, 237(1), 235-249.
• Susan Anyosa, Jo Eidsvik and Dario Grana. (2024) Evaluating geophysical monitoring strategies for a CO2 storage project. Computers & Geosciences 185
• Vilja Koski and Jo Eidsvik. (2024) Sampling design methods for making improved lake management decisions. Environmetrics

We hope these CGF researchers will set an encouraging and inspirational example for all our students and researchers to break the tyranny of the blank page and get their good work out into the world! 

18 May - New book from one of our key professors and WP leaders!

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Interest in Carbon Capture and Storage is growing rapidly as it becomes clear that CCS is a crucial part of global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. Prof. Phil Ringrose is our leader for the research workpackage on CCS. To support this growth in CCS technology, an acceleration in new storage project developments is needed. This new book by NTNU Professor Philip Ringrose reviews the science and technology underpinning CO2 storage in deep saline aquifer formations using insights from several industrial-scale projects.

The book may be ordered from: https://go.seg.org/3qDxlr1

15 May - Honorable mention for Best Paper in Geophysics

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We are very excited to announce that a CGF paper with our former PhD student Kittinat Taweesintananon as lead author received an honourable mention for Best Paper in Geophysics 2023. The paper, "Distributed acoustic sensing of ocean-bottom seismo-acoustics and distant storms: A case study from Svalbard, Norway", was published in Geophysics 99, May 2023 and was selected as one of the five best articles for this year. Geophysics typically publish around 400 papers yearly, so this underlines Kittinat's excellent contribution to the journal. Congratulations to Kittinat and the CGF coauthors! 

01 March - First spin-off company from CGF, Sensnet Analytics

On the 26th of January, the company Sensnet Analytics was established. This is the first spin-off company from CGF, and it will focus on services and innovation of using DAS for monitoring and surveillance along infrastructure. The goal is to provide the customers with data and tools to reduce cost of operation, prevent sabotage and hazards, improve maintenance of infrastructure, as well as to contribute to prevention of injuries to humans and animals. The kick-off of the process to form the basis of the company was started in September 2022 by employing dr.ing. Jan Langhammer in a temporary position at CGF with the goal of creating focused activities to establish the company. A licensing agreement with NTNU-TTO as facilitator will be granted to Sensnet Analytics in using the knowhow and developed software within CGF in the coming projects. The last couple of years testing along powerlines has proven that the concept is providing useful insight of the electrical grid. The projects conducted to date at CGF have provided data which are of high interest for powerline companies and will contribute to optimised management and operation of the electrical grid. Although powerline companies in Norway are first to support the spin-off company, there will still be focus on other infrastructure, such as railway networks, urban monitoring, offshore energy transmission infrastructure, environmental monitoring and geohazards. The forming of the company is part of CGF's goal to contribute to industrial activities outside of academia. Jan Langhammer is employed as General Manager and will lead the operation of the company. Chairman of the Board is Ståle Emil Johansen. Main office will be in Ålesund, including presence in Trondheim and Oslo. 

01 February - Visting Professor Nina Mahmoudian

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We were fortunate be able to welcome Assoc. Prof. Nina Mahmoudian to CGF and to learn about her group's research in Purdue University at a CGF seminar on Thursday.  Nina made a flying visit to Trondheim to catch up with colleagues here who are interested in similar research topics.  Nina's goal is to advance maritime autonomous systems capabilities to persistently observe environmental conditions and detect early warning indicators to maintain integrity of oceans and coastal areas. Nina has worked for many years on maritime vehicle autonomy and her interests clearly overlap those at CGF and other centres at NTNU, including AURLab, where we also had very interesting discussions with Martin Ludvigsen.  Nina is currently visiting Joao Sousa in Portugal on a Fulbright scholarship.

23.09.18 – PhD Defence 

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​CGF are delighted to announce that two of our talented PhD. students are students no more!  

On the 18th September Robin Andre Rørstadbotnen defended his thesis entitled "Acoustic and Elastic wave Exploration and Monitoring using Dense Passive Arrays" and the next day Kittinat Taweesintananon defended his thesis "Distributed acoustic sensing and 4D seismic time-strain inversion for subsurface monitoring".  We now have two newly-minted Doctors of Philosophy and we heartily congratulate both on their hard work and crowning educational achievement.  We look forward to working with them as their careers grow in the future.
 
Robin has accepted a post doc position at CGF, where we welcome his continued contributions.

Kit is moving back to Bangkok, Thailand to work as a geophysicist in the Subsurface Technical Solutions Division of PTT Exploration and Production Plc. (PTTEP).

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23.09.01

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​CGF are delighted to celebrate Prof. Lasse Amundsen, a CGF board member, Adjunct Professor at NTNU and senior leader at Equinor, being presented with the Reginald Fessenden Award by the SEG at their meeting in Houston, Texas on 29th August for his extensive contributions to exploration geophysics over many years.  Lasse Amundsen is well known for his work in seabed seismic acquisition and in a variety of areas in seismic and electromagnetic data processing and analysis.  He coauthored SEG's Introduction to Petroleum Seismology, second edition in 2018.  In addition, he coauthored, along with our Director, Martin Landrø, Bivrost's Introduction to Exploration Geophysics in 2018 and From Arrhenius to CO2 Storage in 2023.

23.08.17

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Robin Rørstadbotnen, one of our talented PhD students, was recently invited by EAGE to record an E-Lecture for its educational portal, Learning Geoscience.  The invitation recognises Robin as a distinguished lecturer following his presentation at the EAGE Annual 2022 in Madrid, where his paper 'Analysis of a Local Earthquake in the Arctic Using a 120 KM Long Fibre-Optic Cable´ was presented. It was rated as one of the best rated talks at the event and was selected by the EAGE Education Committee.  Robin's e-Lecture can be accessed at Analysis of a Local Earthquake in the Arctic using a 120 km long Fibre-Optic Cable (learninggeoscience.org)

23.06.21

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Professor Philip Ringrose (CGF WP leader on CO2 and gas/energy storage) has won the SINTEF and NTNU CCS Award 2023. He received the award during the conference dinner at the 12th Trondheim CCS Conference (TCCS-12). 

Building on a solid scientific background as a geoscientist, Philip has specialised in applying his knowledge of the subsurface to CO2 storage, and has worked directly on several large-scale storage projects, such as Sleipner, Snøhvit and In Salah. He currently works as a specialist in geoscience at Equinor and an adjunct professor of CO2 storage at NTNU.  On receiving the award, Philip declared “I’m really honoured, it’s really humbling to receive such a reward, thank you very much, it is a team effort and I’m really proud to be part of this huge team.”  He chairs the Scientific Committee in the Norwegian CCS Research Centre (NCCS), and has been influential in establishing the CO2 DataShare project, which is an open digital portal for sharing data from international CCS projects.

TCCS is a non-profit, leading scientific conference that focuses on the research and development of CCS. Its objective is to advance, present and discuss the latest work in the field undertaken by R&D institutions, universities and industry. TCCS takes place every other year in Trondheim, Norway.

23.06.01

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​It is wonderful to see one of our papers in Geophysics is currently the top-featured publication for May/June 2023 on the SEG library webpage.  The paper is on DAS sensing of storms and other low-frequency features, with lead author Kittinat Taweesintananon.

23.05.23

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​John Potter delivered a keynote presentation at the Oceanoise 2023 conference in Vilanova i la Geltrú, Spain on the potential for DAS to monitor whales and ships.  John subsequently participated in the conference closing discussion panel, which decided to draft an urgent call to governments and operators worldwide to address the growing problem of noise in the ocean.  This call to action was released on 8th June, World Ocean Day.

23.05.03

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One of our talented PhD students, Kristina Shizuka Yamase Skarvang, was recently awarded ´Best Poster Presentation´ for her paper entitled "Comparing Sensitivity of State of Polarization Monitoring and Distributed Acoustic Sensing in the Svalbard Arctic Submarine Communication Cable" at the SubOptic 2023 conference in Bangkok.  SubOptic is a triennial event for the submarine cable industry and this year was focussed on ´Collaborating on our Critical Infrastructure´.  

23.03.20 - CGF supervised student wins Best Masters' Thesis award

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​The winner of the best Masters' thesis in Electronic Systems at NTNU for 2022 was Martin Ericsson with the thesis "Fish-farm Integrated Sensor Cluster: Environmental and Biological Surveillance in Fish-farming Aquaculture with Emphasis on Sensor Fusion". While Martin is not part of CGF, he was supervised by John Potter and the technological focus is of considerable interest, fusing optical and acoustic sensing with AI interpretation.  His award has been written up (in Norwegian) in the elektronikknett magazine.

23.03.10 - GeoExPro article on global data sharing

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​An article in GeoExPro on global data sharing has been published, featuring Phil Ringrose, our WP leader on CO2 storage.  The article  announces the CO2 DataShare online portal, an initiative by the international CO2 Storage Data Consortium, with the goal to make available curated and well-documented datasets from CO2 storage projects. So far, the portal has seen 28,000 downloads from a wealth of different countries.  This is an important development in CO2 storage capability development and sharing and CGF is pleased to see this portal become available.

23.03.06 - Introducing recent arrivals at CGF!

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Tobias has an M.Tech in Computer Science from NTNU that focuses on HPC and optimising linear solvers connected to Newton-Raphson iterations of nonlinear systems using heterogeneous computing. His thesis was a collaboration between the CGF and the HPC-Lab to enhance today's cutting-edge CO2 storage simulation software. For his PhD, he will continue this work by combing different simulation software in a framework and investigate in which scenarios advanced physics modelling is advantageous as opposed to simplified analytical solutions. Tobias will be part of WP5. 

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Maren completed a M.Tech in Computer Science from NTNU with a specialisation in algorithms and HPC. Her Master's thesis was a collaboration between the CGF and the HPC-Lab at NTNU, where she analysed mixed-precision and GPU matrix accelerators for high-order FEM for seismic wave propagation. As part of WP5, Maren’s PhD research will concentrate on tools and techniques to facilitate the performance engineering of FWI codes on emerging computer architectures, primarily focusing on optimisations targeting data movement and especially looking at FWI for seismic imaging.

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Claudi comes to us from the Center of Mathematical Research at the Autonomous
University of Barcelona, where he obtained his bachelor's degree in mathematics and was subsequently employed in the modelling group, working with cutting-edge mathematical advances and their implementation to real-life problems for various industry clients. While enrolled in a master's degree in modelling for science and engineering at the same university, he participated in a project on high-performance computing during his work placement and master's thesis at the Barcelona Biomedical Research Park. In his PhD thesis with WP5, he will be working on developing a
high-performance computing framework for preprocessing large datasets related to high-resolution geophysical monitoring, combining his mathematical modelling background with his high-performance computing experience.

23.02.20

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Our Research Director, Prof. Jo Eidsvik, is featured in the European Consortium for Mathematics in Industry (ECMI) blog today!

23.02.15

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​One of our CGF students, Robin Rørstadbotnen, has been invited to record his EAGE presentation made at the annual EAGE conference in Madrid in 2022 as an e-lecture.  His presentation was one of the best-rated at the conference and also selected by the EAGE Education Committee.

23.02.09

The disastrous magnitude 7.8 earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria on Monday 6th February was reported by our Partner, NORSAR and was also clearly observed on the seabottom fibre connecting Longyearbyen and Ny-Ålesund (Svalbard), which we are monitoring with DAS.

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The image represents DAS data from roughly half an hour (vertical axis) and 60 km of the cable located in Kongsfjorden. The earthquake occurred at 01:17:35 UTC, as reported by USGS. The first arrival (P) is clearly observed at 01:25:42 (UTC). This wave travelled deep into the earth and took 8 minutes to arrive.  The next observed signal (generated by the same earthquake) is the secondary (shear) wave arriving 18 minutes after the quake and the final (third) signal is the surface (Rayleigh) wave arriving 26 minutes after the quake. 

The approximate epicentral distance to Svalbard is 4,780 km. If we assume that the P-, S- and surface- waves each travelled roughly the same distance we can estimate the following velocities for the three waves: 9.8 km/s, 4.3 km/s and 3.0 km/s.
 

23.01.10

Tjuvlytter på jordkloden med fiberoptiske kabler

A very readable (if you can read Norwegian!) article has just been published.  It explains some of the exciting things we are doing at CGF in clear terms that are accessible to the general scientist and curious public.  Check it out on the Gemini.no site! (https://gemini.no/2023/01/tjuvlytter-pa-jordkloden-med-fiberoptiske-kabler/).

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