Yesterday I started to write a little background story to introduce a post on how I use Python and how fun and creative that is. However, the “little background story” started to grow and became something else entirely, so I decided to cut off the science part and leave it for this post here.
So here we are: this post is just a big fat link to one of my Jupyter notebooks that shows how to code rock physics models from published equations, build a rock physics template and use it in conjunction with real data (plus, how to make it interactive through widgets, but to see that you need to download the notebook on your computer, run it locally and basically you need to know what you’re doing).
And if you find yourself asking “what the hell is ROCK PHYSICS”, probably you’re not the right audience for this post (…aaand two out of three people that form my readership have just left for good!). Anyway, it’s about understanding how the strength of the rocks are affected by their basic components like minerals, the fluids they hold, how many pores they have etc. Imagine to hold a pomice and a limestone; one is soft and light, the other hard and heavy. If you can quantify how much harder is one respect to the other, predict what velocity an acoustic wave would have traveling through these two rocks, well that’s rock physics.
update March 2018 I am sporadically updating and modifying my publicly available notebooks, so it is strongly recommended if you have any sort of interest in this to check out my github repo Geophysical Notes.