Lindsey Smith has spent her entire career so far (18 years) with bp as a geophysicist based in Aberdeen, working on North Sea and international projects including early experience with ocean bottom node seismic acquisition. She is now becoming known in the geoscience community for her advocacy of scientific colourmaps over the typical ‘rainbow’ software defaults for geophysical data visualisation. She presented a paper on the topic at this year’s Annual in Oslo.
How was growing up on a farm?
I grew up on a mixed farm in Perthshire, Scotland. My dad had suckler cows, grew cereal crops, potatoes and probably the best fruit, raspberries (although we didn’t think that at the time, we were always sick of raspberries by the end of the summer). I am the eldest of four and my mum once told me that if we weren’t bothering her, she didn’t mind what we were up to, so we had a lot of freedom, particularly when the weather was good. If it was bad, we watched a lot of TV.
Geology v geophysics dilemma
My favourite subject at school was geography. I liked learning about the physical processes that formed the landscapes around me and the art of drawing figures and diagrams, rather than writing essays. I chose geophysics rather than geology for two reasons: images of the earth’s interior and sea floor age (ironically in a rainbow colour map) inspired me to study the physical processes and properties of the Earth, and secondly, we had the 1990 film Tremors on VHS — I wanted to be a seismologist like Rhonda LeBeck.
Year off experience
After my undergraduate degree at the University of Edinburgh, which included a year abroad at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, I wanted to stay in academia, but had a year off including some time in New Zealand. I managed to do some voluntary geophysical field work on a project studying the Alpine fault in South Island, as well as working on a fruit farm picking pears and agricultural labouring on the back of a potato harvester. I cut my trip short to come back to the UK for a seismic acquisition cruise in the North Atlantic to collect data for my PhD.
Career highlights so far
I worked in bp’s North Sea seismic delivery team in the late 2000s/early 2010s. This was a time when we started to acquire more ocean bottom cable surveys across our producing fields, balancing imaging requirements with survey costs. Latterly, I worked on Clair for four years after bp acquired an ultra-high density nodes survey in 2010, looking at the multi-component data and testing FWI-technology. These roles were great, but the real highlights for me were the people I worked with.
Current role at bp
With the advent of remote working, I’ve had the opportunity to work on some fields outside the North Sea including Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli (ACG), Azerbaijan, again with interesting imaging challenges and new OBN seismic. I am currently back in the North Sea, working on site characterisation of potential saline aquifers for CCS as part of the North Endurance Project.
Colourmap mission?
In one sentence: Change the default colourmap! In a bit more detail: we’ve been talking in bp about improving data visualisation with colour since 2017 after we read Matt Hall’s Agile Scientific blog titled ‘No more rainbows!’. We have seen from tests on our data the improvements to be gained in interpretation, analysis and communication by swapping out bright colourmaps like rainbows for those designed specifically for scientific data visualisation. I want to help close the knowledge gap around the science of visualisation of data with colour in the wider applied geosciences community and encourage people to both explore how the choice of colourmap influences the ease and accuracy of interpretation and to challenge the default colourmaps that are available in their visualisation toolkits. There are many open source scientific colourmaps which are accurate, intuitive and accessible for those with colour vision deficiency. Search for ‘scientific colourmaps’ to find out more.
Mid career: what next?
I like what I do. There are always new things to learn, new ways of working and new technologies to help us understand the subsurface geology better, all of which will keep me in a technical role.
How do you spend time off?
My main hobby is cycling, either commuting to work or out at the weekend with family or friends. For the past 15 years bp North Sea has organised a three-day coast to coast charity bike ride from the west coast of Scotland back to Aberdeen. I’ve done six of those rides and I’m planning to do it again next year.
