Seismology

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Overview

Seismology studies how seismic waves reveal Earth’s interior and how earthquakes and ground motion develop, supporting hazard assessment, exploration, and monitoring. Work combines physical methods such as phase picking, tomography, moment-tensor inversion, and wave-equation simulation with neural networks, transformers, self-supervised learning, and generative models for detection, denoising, prediction, and subsurface imaging. Evaluation spans earthquake catalogs and regional or teleseismic records, synthetic wavefields and velocity models, field surveys, and sparse sensor arrays, with probabilistic inference used to quantify uncertainty. A central challenge is making data-driven systems reliable across regions, instruments, geology, and noise while preserving physical consistency and signal fidelity, especially when labeled field data are scarce.

Latest papers

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43 papers5 papers in the last four weeks, up 25% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

May 10, 2026

Evaluating PhaseNet on Teleseismic Data with MsPASS

Numerous studies have shown that the machine-learning picker PhaseNet produces accurate P and S picks on local earthquake signals, but its performance can degrade sharply on teleseismic signals. To address this limitation, we present a reproducible MsPASS workflow that (i) enables scalable data preparation and management for large seismic archives and (ii) supports standardized PhaseNet training and inference. We assembled a control dataset of 1.6 million waveforms linked to teleseismic P-wave picks made by analysts at the USArray Array Network Facility (ANF). The control dataset confirms that the PhaseNet model trained on regional signals performs poorly on these data. We then trained PhaseNet from scratch on the training split of the ANF control dataset and evaluated it on a non-overlapping held-out test split, increasing P-pick recall by 741.5% and yielding 683.9% more picks within a 0.1s residual window. We also evaluated PhaseNet across different model sizes on both CPUs and GPUs. Increasing the model size by about 120 times improved precision and recall by 15.6% and 23.2%, respectively. However, the scaled model reduced inference throughput by 87.2% on an NVIDIA A100 GPU and by 97.3% on a 128-core high-performance CPU node. These results indicate that scaling PhaseNet is more practical on GPUs than on CPUs, and that simply enlarging the model is not an efficient way to achieve large accuracy gains.

Jinxin Ma, Yinzhi Wang, Gary L. Pavlis +1

Texas Advanced Computing Center, The University of Texas at Austin · Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405

Efficient Neural Network InferenceSeismology
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May 10, 2026

Real-Time Earthquake Magnitude Classification from Initial P-Waves: Models, Dataset, and Comparative Analysis for South Asia

Rapid earthquake magnitude estimation is crucial for effective early warning systems that can save lives and reduce economic damage. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study of magnitude classification using only the vertical component of the initial 7-second P-wave window from a single station. We compare six machine learning approaches that range from traditional models to state-of-the-art deep learning architectures. We also curated a novel dataset of 7,318 earthquake events in South Asia. The dataset was categorized into five Richter-scale classes: slight (3.0-3.9), light (4.0-4.9), moderate (5.0-5.9), strong (6.0-6.9) and severe (>= 7.0). Our experiments show that deep learning models substantially outperform traditional approaches. Our Transformer based architecture achieved 76.23% standard accuracy and 81.56% adaptive accuracy with 4.8 ms inference latency. The adaptive-accuracy metric is introduced for the inherent uncertainty in magnitude estimation of near class boundaries. These results indicate that the attention mechanisms in Transformers combined with adaptive classification effectively capture the temporal dynamics of seismic signals. The architectural advantage facilitates promising generalization to rare high-magnitude events, despite the inherent data scarcity characteristic of seismic catalogs. The adaptive accuracy provides a more realistic assessment of model performance, and the result suggests viability for real-time deployment.

Md Nasiat Hasan Fahim, Md. Abid Ullah Muhib, Rayhanul Amin Tanvir +1

Department of Computer Science and Engineering Shahjalal University of Science and Technology Sylhet, Bangladesh

Time Series ClassificationSeismology
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Apr 30, 2026

Parameter-Efficient Adaptation of Pre-Trained Vision Foundation Models for Active and Passive Seismic Data Denoising

The demand for high-resolution subsurface imaging and continuous Earth monitoring has driven rapid growth in active and passive seismic data from dense geophone deployments, distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) arrays, and large-scale 2D and 3D surveys. This expansion makes complex noise suppression increasingly challenging, especially when signal fidelity must be preserved. Conventional supervised deep learning methods are often task-specific, require large paired datasets, and can suffer from domain shift under new acquisition conditions. Foundation models offer a promising alternative, but pre-training seismic foundation models from scratch requires massive domain-specific data and substantial computation. We propose an efficient framework that repurposes general-purpose Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) for geophysical tasks through Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning. The architecture uses a pre-trained VFM, a DINOv3 encoder, adapted with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to enable effective feature adaptation with few additional parameters. To improve robustness under unseen field conditions without ground truth, we introduce a kurtosis-guided unsupervised test-time adaptation module that updates only LoRA parameters during inference. This module self-calibrates the model to site-specific noise by identifying information-rich regions via kurtosis and performing self-training without labeled data. Experiments on public exploration seismic images and DAS vertical seismic profiling data from the Utah FORGE site show that the framework matches or outperforms domain-specific models. Tests on unseen cross-site data from a land survey in China and the Groß Schönebeck geothermal site in Germany further demonstrate strong generalization and effective signal-noise separation. These results highlight the potential of adapting pre-trained VFMs to data-intensive problems in exploration seismology.

Jiahua Zhao, Umair bin Waheed, Jing Sun +3

Computation-based Science and Technology Research Center, The Cyprus Institute, Nicosia, Cyprus · Department of Geosciences, College of Petroleum Engineering and Geosciences, King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia · Department of Intelligent Systems, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands +2

Test-Time AdaptationVision Foundation Model AdaptationSeismologyParameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning
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Apr 5, 2026

Physical Sensitivity Kernels Can Emerge in Data-Driven Forward Models: Evidence From Surface-Wave Dispersion

Data-driven neural networks are increasingly used as surrogate forward models in geophysics, but it remains unclear whether they recover only the data mapping or also the underlying physical sensitivity structure. Here we test this question using surface-wave dispersion. By comparing automatically differentiated gradients from a neural-network surrogate with theoretical sensitivity kernels, we show that the learned gradients can recover the main depth-dependent structure of physical kernels across a broad range of periods. This indicates that neural surrogate models can learn physically meaningful differential information, rather than acting as purely black-box predictors. At the same time, strong structural priors in the training distribution can introduce systematic artifacts into the inferred sensitivities. Our results show that neural forward surrogates can recover useful physical information for inversion and uncertainty analysis, while clarifying the conditions under which this differential structure remains physically consistent.

Ziye Yu, Yuqi Cai, Xin Liu

Institute of Geophysics, China Earthquake Administration, Beijing 100081, China · Laboratory of Seismology and Physics of Earth’s Interior, School of Earth and Space Sciences, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, China · Institute of Advanced Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230088, China

Neural Surrogate ModelingSeismology
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Apr 1, 2026

Large Vision Model-Guided Masked Low-Rank Approximation for Ground-Roll Attenuation

Ground roll is a common type of coherent noise in seismic records, and its attenuation remains challenging due to its substantial overlap with useful reflections in localized regions. Existing attenuation methods can be broadly classified into global and local categories according to whether ground-roll-contaminated regions are explicitly identified. Global methods, however, typically impose uniform attenuation on both contaminated and uncontaminated regions, which may result in signal leakage or distortion of reflections. By contrast, local methods restrict attenuation to contaminated regions and are therefore less prone to unnecessary modification of clean areas. However, their performance is often limited by manually designed or simplistic model-based mask estimation strategies. To address these limitations, we propose a large vision model-guided masked low-rank approximation (LVM-LRA) framework for ground-roll attenuation. Within this framework, a promptable LVM is first employed to identify ground-roll-dominant regions in seismic records through multimodal prompting and to generate accurate, fine-grained masks. The estimated masks are then incorporated into an LRA model for ground-roll attenuation. A global low-rank constraint is imposed on the reflection component to preserve event continuity, whereas a mask-guided local low-rank constraint is imposed on the ground-roll component so that its separation is confined to the masked regions. An iterative optimization algorithm based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is further developed to solve the resulting model efficiently. Experiments on synthetic and field datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves more effective ground-roll attenuation and better suppresses signal leakage than the baseline methods.

Jiacheng Liao, Feng Qian, Ziyin Fan +1

School of Information and Communication Engineering, Center for Information Geoscience, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, 611731 China · School of Resources and Environment, Center for Information Geoscience, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, 611731 China

SeismologyLow-Rank Approximation
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Mar 31, 2026

SAGE: Subsurface AI-driven Geostatistical Extraction with proxy posterior

Recent advances in generative networks have enabled new approaches to subsurface velocity model synthesis, offering a compelling alternative to traditional methods such as Full Waveform Inversion. However, these approaches predominantly rely on the availability of large-scale datasets of high-quality, geologically realistic subsurface velocity models, which are often difficult to obtain in practice. We introduce SAGE, a novel framework for statistically consistent proxy velocity generation from incomplete observations, specifically sparse well logs and migrated seismic images. During training, SAGE learns a proxy posterior over velocity models conditioned on both modalities (wells and seismic); at inference, it produces full-resolution velocity fields conditioned solely on migrated images, with well information implicitly encoded in the learned distribution. This enables the generation of geologically plausible and statistically accurate velocity realizations. We validate SAGE on both synthetic and field datasets, demonstrating its ability to capture complex subsurface variability under limited observational constraints. Furthermore, samples drawn from the learned proxy distribution can be leveraged to train downstream networks, supporting inversion workflows. Overall, SAGE provides a scalable and data-efficient pathway toward learning geological proxy posterior for seismic imaging and inversion. Repo link: https://github.com/slimgroup/SAGE.

Huseyin Tuna Erdinc, Ipsita Bhar, Rafael Orozco +2

Georgia Institute of Technology · Oxy · Huber Engineered Materials

SeismologyConditional Generative ModelingSeismic ImagingInverse Problems
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Mar 25, 2026

Transcending Classical Neural Network Boundaries: A Quantum-Classical Synergistic Paradigm for Seismic Data Processing

In recent years, a number of neural-network (NN) methods have exhibited good performance in seismic data processing, such as denoising, interpolation, and frequency-band extension. However, these methods rely on stacked perceptrons and standard activation functions, which imposes a bottleneck on the representational capacity of deep-learning models, making it difficult to capture the complex and non-stationary dynamics of seismic wavefields. Different from the classical perceptron-stacked NNs which are fundamentally confined to real-valued Euclidean spaces, the quantum NNs leverage the exponential state space of quantum mechanics to map the features into high-dimensional Hilbert spaces, transcending the representational boundary of classical NNs. Based on this insight, we propose a quantum-classical synergistic generative adversarial network (QC-GAN) for seismic data processing, serving as the first application of quantum NNs in seismic exploration. In QC-GAN, a quantum pathway is used to exploit the high-order feature correlations, while the convolutional pathway specializes in extracting the waveform structures of seismic wavefields. Furthermore, we design a QC feature complementarity loss to enforce the feature orthogonality in the proposed QC-GAN. This novel loss function can ensure that the two pathways encode non-overlapping information to enrich the capacity of feature representation. On the whole, by synergistically integrating the quantum and convolutional pathways, the proposed QC-GAN breaks the representational bottleneck inherent in classical GAN. Experimental results on denoising and interpolation tasks demonstrate that QC-GAN preserves wavefield continuity and amplitude-phase information under complex noise conditions.

Zhengyi Yuan, Xintong Dong, Xinyang Wang +2

College of Instrumentation and Electrical Engineering, Jilin University, Changchun 130026, China.

Quantum Neural NetworksHybrid Quantum-Classical MLQuantum Generative ModelingSeismology
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Mar 22, 2026

TRACE: A Multi-Agent System for Autonomous Physical Reasoning for Seismology

Modern seismic networks resolve earthquake sequences in unprecedented detail, yet explaining how large earthquakes emerge from evolving fault systems remains difficult. We introduce TRACE, a seismology-guided artificial intelligence agent that plans and executes workflows while preserving auditable evidence chains from observations to physical interpretation. We evaluated TRACE through 104 benchmark tasks and two complementary earthquake sequences. For the well-studied 2019 Ridgecrest sequence, TRACE constructed a high-resolution catalog from continuous waveforms and retrospectively recovered delayed cascading activation between the Mw 6.4 and Mw 7.1 earthquakes without a prescribed target interpretation. In the less-understood 2025-2026 Sanriku sequence off northeastern Japan, TRACE developed a testable interpretation of progressive destabilization within a segmented megathrust. Its synthesis linked coupled seismic-aseismic activation around the MJ 6.9 sequence and subsequent persistent, spatially segmented shallow-interface activity to a megathrust patch that lay between regions of past large coseismic slip and later hosted the MJ 7.7 rupture. These results open a path from seismic observations to testable physical insight.

Feng Liu, Xin Cui, Jian Xu +11

School of Electronic Information and Electrical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China. · Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Shanghai, China. · School of Earth and Space Sciences, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China. +3

Physical ReasoningAI Agents for Scientific DiscoverySeismologyMulti-Agent ReasoningAutonomous Research Agents
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Mar 19, 2026

Improving moment tensor solutions under Earth structure uncertainty with simulation-based inference

Bayesian inference represents a principled way to incorporate Earth structure uncertainty in full-waveform moment tensor inversions, but traditional approaches generally require significant approximations that risk biasing the resulting solutions. We introduce a robust method for handling theory errors using simulation-based inference (SBI), a machine learning approach that empirically models their impact on the observations. This framework retains the rigour of Bayesian inference while avoiding restrictive assumptions about the functional form of the uncertainties. We begin by demonstrating that the common Gaussian parametrisation of theory errors breaks down under minor (1−3%1-3 \%) 1-D Earth model uncertainty. To address this issue, we develop two formalisms for utilising SBI to improve the quality of the moment tensor solutions: one using physics-based insights into the theory errors, and another utilising an end-to-end deep learning algorithm. We then compare the results of moment tensor inversion with the standard Gaussian approach and SBI, and demonstrate that Gaussian assumptions induce bias and significantly under-report moment tensor uncertainties. We also show that these effects are particularly problematic when inverting short period data and for shallow, isotropic events. On the other hand, SBI produces more reliable, better calibrated posteriors of the earthquake source mechanism. Finally, we successfully apply our methodology to two well studied moderate magnitude earthquakes: one from the 1997 Long Valley Caldera volcanic earthquake sequence, and the 2020 Zagreb earthquake.

A. A. Saoulis, T. -S. Pham, A. M. G. Ferreira

Department of Physics & Astronomy, University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT, United Kingdom · Department of Earth Sciences, University College London, 5 Gower Place, London, WC1E 6BS, United Kingdom · Research School of Earth Sciences, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia

SeismologyUncertainty QuantificationInverse ProblemsBayesian Inverse ProblemsSimulation-Based Inference
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Mar 18, 2026

Physics-Aware Machine Learning for Seismic and Volcanic Signal Interpretation

Modern seismic and volcanic monitoring is increasingly shaped by continuous, multi-sensor observations and by the need to extract actionable information from nonstationary, noisy wavefields. In this context, machine learning has moved from a research curiosity to a practical ingredient of processing chains for detection, phase picking, classification, denoising, and anomaly tracking. However, improved accuracy on a fixed dataset is not sufficient for operational use. Models must remain reliable under domain shift (new stations, changing noise, evolving volcanic activity), provide uncertainty that supports decision-making, and connect their outputs to physically meaningful constraints. This paper surveys and organizes recent ML approaches for seismic and volcanic signal analysis, highlighting where classical signal processing provides indispensable inductive bias, how self-supervision and generative modeling can reduce dependence on labels, and which evaluation protocols best reflect transfer across regions. We conclude with open challenges for robust, interpretable, and maintainable AI-assisted monitoring.

William Thorossian

Physics-Informed MLSeismology
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Mar 18, 2026

Large-Scale 3D Ground-Motion Synthesis with Physics-Inspired Latent Operator Flow Matching

Earthquake hazard analysis and design of spatially distributed infrastructure, such as power grids and energy pipeline networks, require scenario-specific ground-motion time histories with realistic frequency content and spatiotemporal coherence. However, producing the large ensembles needed for uncertainty quantification with physics-based simulations is computationally intensive and impractical for engineering workflows. To address this challenge, we introduce Ground-Motion Flow (GMFlow), a physics-inspired latent operator flow matching framework that generates realistic, large-scale regional ground-motion time-histories conditioned on physical parameters. Validated on simulated earthquake scenarios in the San Francisco Bay Area, GMFlow generates spatially coherent ground motion across more than 9 million grid points in seconds, achieving a 10,000-fold speedup over the simulation workflow, which opens a path toward rapid and uncertainty-aware hazard assessment for distributed infrastructure. More broadly, GMFlow advances mesh-agnostic functional generative modeling and could potentially be extended to the synthesis of large-scale spatiotemporal physical fields in diverse scientific domains.

Yaozhong Shi, Grigorios Lavrentiadis, Konstantinos Tsalouchidis +5

Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA · School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, USA · Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, USA +2

Physics-Informed Generative ModelingSeismologyFlow-Based Generative ModelingFlow Matching
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Mar 17, 2026

Domain-informed explainable boosting machines for trustworthy lateral spread predictions

Explainable Boosting Machines (EBMs) provide transparent predictions through additive shape functions, enabling direct inspection of feature contributions. However, EBMs can learn non-physical relationships that reduce their reliability in natural hazard applications. This study presents a domain-informed framework to improve the physical consistency of EBMs for lateral spreading prediction. Our approach modifies learned shape functions based on domain knowledge. These modifications correct non-physical behavior while maintaining data-driven patterns. We apply the method to the 2011 Christchurch earthquake dataset and correct non-physical trends observed in the original EBM. The resulting model produces more physically consistent global and local explanations, with an acceptable tradeoff in accuracy (4--5%).

Cheng-Hsi Hsiao, Krishna Kumar, Ellen M. Rathje

Interpretable MLPhysics-Informed MLSeismology
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Feb 23, 2026

GreenPhase: A Green Learning Approach for Earthquake Phase Picking

Earthquake detection and seismic phase picking are fundamental yet challenging tasks in seismology due to low signal-to-noise ratios, waveform variability, and overlapping events. Recent deep-learning models achieve strong results but rely on large datasets and heavy backpropagation training, raising concerns over efficiency, interpretability, and sustainability. We propose GreenPhase, a multi-resolution, feed-forward, and mathematically interpretable model based on the Green Learning framework. GreenPhase comprises three resolution levels, each integrating unsupervised representation learning, supervised feature learning, and decision learning. Its feed-forward design eliminates backpropagation, enabling independent module optimization with stable training and clear interpretability. Predictions are refined from coarse to fine resolutions while computation is restricted to candidate regions. On the Stanford Earthquake Dataset (STEAD), GreenPhase achieves excellent performance with F1 scores of 1.0 for detection, 0.98 for P-wave picking, and 0.96 for S-wave picking. This is accomplished while reducing the computational cost (FLOPs) for inference by approximately 83% compared to state-of-the-art models. These results demonstrate that the proposed model provides an efficient, interpretable, and sustainable alternative for large-scale seismic monitoring.

Yixing Wu, Shiou-Ya Wang, Dingyi Nie +5

Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Southern California · Center for Earth and Environmental Studies, National Central University · Department of Computer Science & Information Engineering, National Central University

SeismologyEfficient Neural Network Inference
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