Earth Science Frontiers ›› 2024, Vol. 31 ›› Issue (4): 129-138.DOI: 10.13745/j.esf.sf.2024.5.7

Previous Articles     Next Articles

InterfaceGrid: Gridding representation of 3D geological models for complex geological structures

NIU Lujia1,2,3(), SHI Chengyue4, WANG Zhangang4,*(), ZHOU Yongzhang1,2,3,*()   

  1. 1. Guangdong Provincial Key Lab of Geological Process and Mineral Resource Survey, Zhuhai 519000, China
    2. School of Earth Sciences & Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Zhuhai 519000, China
    3. Research Center of Earth Environment & Resources, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510275, China
    4. School of Geosciences & Surveying Engineering, China University of Mining and Technology (Beijing), Beijing 100083, China
  • Received:2023-11-11 Revised:2024-03-06 Online:2024-07-25 Published:2024-07-10

Abstract:

3D structural geological models are a digital representation of geological structures and geological body (object) boundaries in geological space. With the increasing demands for raster and vector integration and spatial query and analysis of geological data, the construction of integrated spatial data model for unified expression of geological structures has become one of the basic problems of 3D geological information science. To address the problem of expressing complex geological structures by regular grids, PillarGrid, Stack-Based Representation of Terrains (SBRT), etc., this study proposes the InterfaceGrid data model to fully consider that the distribution of geological structures/attributes underground exhibit strong non-uniformity, discontinuity, spatially multi-scaled, and show longitudinal stratification and multi-attribute field coupling. By design, this InterfaceGrid data model can uniformly describe 3D geological structures and realize the vector raster integration expression of complex geological structures. In this paper, the formal expression framework of InterfaceGrid is constructed based on GeoAtom theory; the construction process of the InterfaceGrid model is described; and the data update and spatial query algorithms are designed based on the InterfaceGrid model. The volume visualization and online browsing of geological grid are realized using GPU ray casting and adaptive sampling strategy. Compared with SBRT, InterfaceGrid can more truly describe the geological boundaries and improve the accuracy of 3D structural geological models. The application of InterfaceGrid in the 3D grid construction of the global lithosphere verifies the applicability of InterfaceGrid in the organization and management of large-scale geological data. Compared with PillarGrid, the data volume is reduced by about 1/3 in InterfaceGrid, making it more suitable for the data-intensive geoscience network applications.

Key words: 3D structural geological model, InterfaceGrid, visualization, fault modeling, spatial query

CLC Number: