用少量钻孔数据,实现全国尺度地下温度精准预测。
In-context learning enables continental-scale subsurface temperature prediction from sparse local observations

- 基于上下文学习的Transformer模型,用稀疏钻孔数据推断连续温深场。
- 美国均方误差4.7℃,优于多个物理模型和插值方法。
- 无需微调即可跨区域适配,适合地质条件各异的资源评估。
大陆尺度的地下温度知识受限于钻孔测量的成本与稀疏性,但该信息对地热资源评估和浅层地壳热运移研究至关重要。热场反映岩性、地壳结构、放射性生热与对流流体的相互作用,常产生尖锐异常,传统插值会平滑这些特征,物理模型亦难捕捉。本文提出In-Context Earth,一种基于Transformer的模型,利用稀疏局部钻孔观测作为地质上下文,预测连续的温深场并提供校准后的不确定性估计。在美国本土,模型均方误差为4.7℃,优于基于AlphaEarth嵌入的斯坦福热力模型、多模态Transparent Earth模型及通用克里金法,并能更好解析地热区的陡峭温度梯度。其不确定性估计校准良好,柯尔莫戈洛夫-斯米尔诺夫统计量为2.5%。无需微调,仅需20个本地观测,模型即能在阿尔伯塔、澳大利亚和英国(UK)适配,测试区域均方误差分别为2.2℃(阿尔伯塔)、6.2℃(澳大利亚)、5.4℃(英国)。可解释性分析表明,模型在训练中未见的条件下,学习到地震波速、地球化学与地壳结构等内部表征,并以物理一致方式使用。本工作证明,在上下文学习框架下,仅靠稀疏钻孔数据即可实现大陆尺度地下表征,无需密集测量或区域特异性再训练。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Continental-scale knowledge of subsurface temperature is limited by the cost and sparsity of borehole measurements, but such information is essential for geothermal resource assessment and for understanding heat transport in the shallow crust. The thermal field reflects the interaction between lithology, crustal structure, radiogenic heat production, and advective fluid flow, sometimes producing sharp anomalies that are smoothed by conventional interpolation or difficult to capture with physical models. Here we introduce In-Context Earth, a transformer-based model that uses sparse local borehole observations as geological context to predict continuous temperature-at-depth fields with calibrated uncertainty. In the contiguous United States, the model achieves a mean absolute error of 4.7 °C, outperforming the physics-informed Stanford Thermal Model, a model based on AlphaEarth embeddings, the multimodal Transparent Earth model, and universal kriging, while resolving sharper thermal gradients in geothermal provinces. Its uncertainty estimates are well calibrated, with a Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistic of 2.5%. Without finetuning, the model adapts to Alberta, Australia, and the United Kingdom (UK) using only 20 local observations at inference time, maintaining high accuracy in geologically distinct test regions with a mean absolute error of 2.2 °C in Alberta, 6.2 °C in Australia, and 5.4 °C in the UK. Interpretability analyses show that the model learns internal representations of subsurface properties it never observes during training, including seismic velocities, geochemistry, and crustal structure, and uses these representations in physically consistent ways. More broadly, this work shows that in-context learning can use sparse borehole observations for continental-scale subsurface characterization, without requiring dense measurements or region-specific retraining.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。