3D Geologic / Geochemical Modeling
What is it?
A 3D Geologic Model (3DGM) is a 3-dimensional representation of rocks and sediments distribution at both the Earth’s surface and subsurface. 3DGM is a fundamental tool for natural reservoir characterization and modeling, namely in oil industry, and an increasingly used tool in other geoscience research fields and in land use planning and mitigation of geological and environmental hazards.
Why use it?
To accompany and to take benefit of the potentialities of the new technologies which already let us to produce and visualize digital 3DGM. This can be a powerful tool to better understand and communicate geology. The traditional 2D geologic maps no longer are sufficient for storing, displaying, and transmitting geosciences information, while 3DGM allows us to get a realistic visualization and to model the geometry and the properties of the geological setting at 3D. This is needed to provide users with geologic information of the quality and detail necessary to solve problems related to natural hazard mitigation, resource management, mineral and petroleum exploration, contaminant dispersion, etc. 3DGM is also a fundamental base to develop 4D models for analysis, prediction and/or paleo-reconstruction of geologic, tectonic and hidrogeologic structures and processes.
What to do?
- To reconstruct geological structures in 3 dimensions; to model geological properties in 3 dimensions; Research on the relationship between geological structure and geochemical properties, namely in mineralized areas, through the 3D reconstruction, visualization and analysis using geostatistical tools.
- Optimization of methods for 3D geologic reconstruction in the presence of sparse data. - Uncertainty assessment of the 3D models.
- Optimization of geologic databases in order to produce good quality 3D geologic models. - Applications of Sequence Stratigraphy; Time-stratigraphy (stratigraphic grids, Geo-Chronological space); Modeling of lateral and vertical facies trends in geostatistical algorithms; Well log correlations.
- Regularization of borehole sampling step with irregular size into a regular grid.

Regional Geochemical Mapping
- Study of Geochemical properties in the spatial domain.
- Use of statistic and geostatistical tools in geochemical mapping and environmental geochemistry of stream sediments and soils, in order to discriminate the anthropogenic signal from natural geochemical background.