Keynote Speakers Announced for SSA’s Seismic Tomography 2022

17 February 2022–Six leading experts in seismic tomography will present their most recent research and their perspective on where their field is headed at Seismic Tomography: What Comes Next? The in-person conference, presented by the Seismological Society of America, is scheduled for 28-30 October 2022 in Toronto, Canada.

The keynote speakers are:

  • Sergei Lebedev, University of Cambridge/ Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies: “Increasing the resolution of global and regional tomography: progress and challenges”
  • Nicholas Rawlinson, University of Cambridge: “From travel time to adjoint waveform tomography in Southeast Asia, where never the twain shall meet…”
  • Jeroen Ritsema, University of Michigan: “Heterogeneity of seismic wave velocity in Earth’s mantle”
  • Barbara Romanowicz, University of California, Berkeley / Collège de France: “40 years of global mantle tomography: achievements and challenges ahead”
  • Carl Tape, University of Alaska Fairbanks: “Seismic imaging of sedimentary basins with complex seismic wave propagation”
  • Jeroen Tromp, Princeton University: “Source encoding and uncertainty quantification for global waveform inversion”

The keynote speakers, along with conference co-chairs Andreas Fichtner of ETH Zürich and Clifford Thurber of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will also participate in separate panel discussions intended to actively engage all participants. Oral and poster presentations from the community will round out the three-day conference.

The meeting’s goal is to explore both classic and cutting-edge tomographic approaches, encompassing a wide range of methods and novel applications used to image the internal structure of the Earth.

“This meeting also will be an opportunity for our seismic tomography community to gather again and discuss about the future of the field after a rather long period where personal interaction was nearly impossible,” said Fichtner.

Abstract submissions for the meeting open on 1 April 2022 and close on 31 May 2022. Meeting attendance is limited and priority will be given to those presenting an abstract. General registration requests will be considered by the co-chairs in June/July 2022. The full program will be announced in July 2022.

Researchers interested in attending the meeting should present abstracts that reflect ambitious and forward-thinking ideas about the future of seismic tomography, the co-chairs said.

Some of the topics they hope to see in abstract submissions include time-dependent tomography; studies spanning the scales from near-surface imaging to structures tens to thousands of kilometers below the surface; approaches towards data-rich full waveform tomography; novel concepts and methods for uncertainty quantification, and joint inversion techniques that include non-seismic data.

Other topics might include the gaps in geographical coverage by tomography instrumentation, the development of new instruments that can be deployed in environments such as the ocean bottom or that piggyback off existing technology such as fiber-optic cables, and ways to improve the computational bottleneck that tomographers often face in their modeling.