ADDRESSING WATER AND SOIL GEOCHEMISTRY QUESTIONS USING DATA-DRIVEN APPROACHES (Invited Presentation)

Water and soil are essential and critical components of the critical zone, i.e., Earth’s outer skin that sustains nearly all terrestrial life including humans. Characterization of water and soil systems is utterly complicated due to their heterogeneous and anisotropic properties, especially when anthropogenic activities are also involved. In the big data era, the improved computational capability along with the new assemblage of varying types of geochemical, geophysical, and biological datasets provide us new tools to probe water and soil geochemistry-related questions, particularly those pertaining to the assessment of anthropogenic impacts.

In this presentation, we will demonstrate a few examples of our recent research efforts in which we apply various data-driven approaches to resolve a few critical soil and water geochemistry-related science questions on multiple spatiotemporal scales. In addition, we will also share our thoughts on what we can benefit from and contribute to the emerging big data evolution across the Earth science fields, particularly as geochemists.