Surveying long stretches of land for tunnels, pipelines and other subsurface infrastructure can be a time-consuming process when there is limited information on the local geology. Even with proper survey data, making sense of it for heavy civil work is a whole other challenge. But developing technologies offer new approaches to age-old problems.
“[We see it as] BIM for the subsurface,” explains Ronny Liverød, vice president of business development at EMerald Geomodelling. “Helicopter radar scanning is good for seeing what's there, but not good for boundaries,” he explains. Geologists can improve the model with onsite drill surveys, but that takes time. “We have developed a learning algorithm that combines geophysical measurement with geotechnical information, [along with the] ground truth to find where the bedrock actually is.”