In-context learning enables continental-scale subsurface temperature prediction from sparse local observations
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Computer Science > Machine Learning
arXiv:2605.16665 (cs)
[Submitted on 15 May 2026]
Title:In-context learning enables continental-scale subsurface temperature prediction from sparse local observations
Authors:Daniel O'Malley, Christopher W. Johnson, Javier E. Santos, Pablo Lara, Sandro Malusà, Bharat Srikishan, John Kath, Arnab Mazumder, Mohamed Mehana, David Coblentz, Nathan DeBardeleben, Earl Lawrence, Hari Viswanathan
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Abstract: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.
| Subjects: | Machine Learning (cs.LG); Geophysics (physics.geo-ph) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2605.16665 [cs.LG] |
| (or arXiv:2605.16665v1 [cs.LG] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.16665
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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View a PDF of the paper titled In-context learning enables continental-scale subsurface temperature prediction from sparse local observations, by Daniel O'Malley and Christopher W. Johnson and Javier E. Santos and Pablo Lara and Sandro Malus\`a and Bharat Srikishan and John Kath and Arnab Mazumder and Mohamed Mehana and David Coblentz and Nathan DeBardeleben and Earl Lawrence and Hari Viswanathan
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