Tesfahiwet Yemane
What I do
I am dedicated to leveraging the power of deep learning in seismology. My research focuses on imaging geothermal systems and detecting geothermal brines, potential sources of renewable energy and vital reservoirs of critical metals such as lithium using seismic methods, including travel-time tomography, attenuation tomography, ambient noise tomography, and others.
Grants
From January 2023 to June 2026, I have been supported by the Clarendon Scholarship, a fully funded PhD award. I have also received several travel grants for conferences and academic purposes, including support from St John’s College, University of Oxford, the British Geophysical Association, the International Association of Seismology and Physics of the Earth’s Interior, the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, the Swiss National Science Foundation and others.
Research
Prior to my PhD work, I worked on the electrical resistivity method, primarily focusing on how electric current flows in the subsurface and how it can be modelled using different electrode spacings. During my PhD, I focused on imaging the Aluto-Langano Geothermal Field using various seismic and magnetotelluric methods, which successfully identified areas of high fluid content and elevated temperatures.
Conferences
My research has resulted in high-impact publications and presentations at major international conferences, including the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (Berlin, 2023), the European Geosciences Union (Vienna, 2025), the British Geophysical Association’s New Advances in Geophysics (Norwich, 2023), the British Seismological Meeting (2024), and the IAGA/IASPEI Joint Scientific Meeting (Lisbon, 2025). I have also presented my work at the Bristol and Oxford Passive Seismic Research Consortium, as well as at specialised workshops hosted by the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (Italy), the GFZ Helmholtz Centre (Germany), and Computational Earth (Italy) and others.
Attenuation tomography
We separated total attenuation into absorption and scattering components to image the Aluto-Langano Geothermal Field. Absorption is sensitive to high temperatures and high fluid content, whereas scattering is sensitive to faults and fracture systems, which act as fluid flow pathways. Both methods can be used as effective exploration tools in geothermal systems, as they clearly distinguish productive from non-productive geothermal wells.
travel time tomography
We also performed travel-time tomography using finite-frequency kernels and jointly inverted for P and S waves. Additionally, we derived the P-to-S wave velocity ratio (Vp/Vs), which adds value to the absorption and scattering maps. The Vp, Vs, and Vp/Vs values can help identify areas of high fluid content and elevated temperatures.
ANT and others
We located the seismicity using traditional methods using using a waveform migration and stacking approach and relocated using non-linear, probabilistic, global-search in 3D and also compared with deep learning models. The seismic events located are used in the travel-time tomography and attenuation tomography.