Geophysics Seminar - Tarje Nissen-Meyer, "A vital geophysical frontier: Seismic soil monitoring towards high-yield, low-impact agriculture"

Speaker: Tarje-Nissen Meyer
Professor in Environmental Intelligence, University of Exeter

Abstract:

Soils are among Earth’s most vital ecosystems: they provide 99% of humanity’s calories, store more carbon than vegetation and the atmosphere combined, regulate water, and host most terrestrial biodiversity. Yet soil health remains poorly characterised because key properties such as bulk density, porosity, carbon, moisture, texture and horizon depth, vary at centimetre-to-metre scales, while conventional sampling is destructive, costly and sparse. Seismology offers a non-destructive, inexpensive and scalable way to image these subsurface properties. I will present work by our non-profit Earth Rover Program spanning field experiments on three continents, development of low-cost high-frequency MEMS sensors and AI-based inference, and results showing seismic mapping of bulk density, soil horizons and temporal moisture variation, with promising implications for improved soil-carbon stock estimates.