[mnky9800n]

In my own research we are investigating how fluids cause changes in rocks that allow for mineralization of CO2 and have such problems of confounding variables (not terribly unique I suppose). One thing we note is that, well, fluid comes from the sky and goes into the ground. Thus, the deeper you go, the less fluid there is since the pathways from the sky to deep into the ground become more sparse as well as needing higher pressures to enter these regions to either overcome capillary pressures in existing fracture zones or to literally break the rock (which is highly unlikely using naturally occuring pressures from fluids from the sky). And so, literally everything in all the data sets correlates with depth in some way. But in what way? well this has many dependencies as well, did the rock that absorbed some of the fluids grow in volume because of a chemical change? are the fluid pathways currently connected? What kind of rock is absorbing the fluids? Are microbes in the fluid absorbing contents from the fluid that would otherwise be used for rock changes? and so you are left with this giant pile of data (tens of terabytes) without a clear connection between fluid and rock interactions except that there is less fluids from the sky the deeper you go into the rock. This is obvious, however it is also rather unhelpful when trying to understand the other processes that exist. Of course you might say, have you tried detrending your data? And the answer is yes and to no effect. The simple truth is that this depth dependency interacts in different ways with different systems and there is no easy way to figure out how it does for each sub-system such as the fluid rock chemistry interactions, the rock fracture mechanics, the subsequent methane and hydrogen that is produced and likely consumed by microbes, etc.

[whatshisface]

Have you tried checking to see if the depth dependency is different in different large-scale geological regions?

[mnky9800n]

That is a really good idea. I have considered it before. A core issue is that most data across different regions is collected and stored in it's own unique way (as far as drilling cores goes anyways). So what I decided was that it might be better to develop some data pipelines first for this region, then trying to refactor those pipelines to accept data from a lot of different regions. So it's on my TODO list but it is a lot of work so I haven't gotten to it yet.