Free geoscience learning resources
Where to learn geoscience and geophysics online without paying for it: the
reference works professionals actually consult, open courses and interactive textbooks,
free software, open seismic datasets, and the rooms where the field talks to itself.
Everything here is free to use and every link was checked by hand.
One entry on this list, OgbonLab, is our own. It is listed in its
category alongside everything else, described the same way, and the rest of the list is
here because we use it ourselves, not to make ours look good by comparison.
Reference works
When a term or a method needs pinning down, these are the references written and
reviewed by the professional societies.
- SEG Wikiwiki.seg.org
- The Society of Exploration Geophysicists' encyclopedia of applied geophysics,
including Sheriff's Encyclopedic Dictionary, digitized textbooks, and problem sets
with worked solutions. The first stop for any seismic term.
- PetroWikipetrowiki.spe.org
- The Society of Petroleum Engineers' wiki, seeded from the seven-volume Petroleum
Engineering Handbook. Strongest on drilling, production, and reservoir engineering.
- AAPG Wikiwiki.aapg.org
- The American Association of Petroleum Geologists' reference on petroleum geology:
traps, seals, source rocks, play elements, and the geology side of exploration.
Open courses and interactive textbooks
Full courses and textbooks you can work through end to end, free, in a browser.
- OgbonLabogbonlab.com
- Interactive textbooks across the subsurface curriculum: rock physics, petrophysics,
geomechanics, seismic acquisition, processing and interpretation, reservoir modeling,
geostatistics, and machine learning for geoscience, plus the underlying mathematics.
Every figure is a live instrument rather than a picture, there are
guided paths with graded checkpoints, Python runs in the page, and
the whole library works offline once loaded. Free, no paywall. This one is ours.
- GeoSci.xyzgeosci.xyz
- Open web textbooks from the University of British Columbia on geophysical surveys,
electromagnetics, and inversion, with interactive apps. Geophysics for Practicing
Geoscientists is the broadest place to start.
- MIT OpenCourseWare, Earth Sciencesocw.mit.edu
- Real MIT courses with lecture notes, problem sets, and in many cases full video:
structural geology, geodynamics, essentials of geophysics, and more.
- EarthScope Consortiumearthscope.org
- The organization formerly known as IRIS. Seismology education materials, animations
of wave propagation and earthquake processes, and access to global seismic data.
- USGS Educational Resourcesusgs.gov
- The United States Geological Survey's teaching materials on general geology,
hazards, water, and mapping, from primary level through university.
Free software and code
The tools of the trade that cost nothing, and the code libraries the field shares.
- OpendTectdgbes.com
- Professional seismic interpretation software from dGB Earth Sciences with a free
tier that is genuinely usable for learning: load a volume, track horizons, pick faults,
compute attributes.
- Fatiando a Terrafatiando.org
- A community-built collection of open Python libraries for geophysics: processing
and gridding field data, forward modeling, and inversion, with good documentation and
tutorials.
- brugesgithub.com
- A bag of really useful geoscience equations, in Python: wavelets, reflection
coefficients, rock physics models, and petrophysics functions, from Agile Scientific.
- OgbonLab Notebooksgithub.com
- Eight self-contained Colab notebooks that generate their own data: the well tie,
wedge tuning, AVO with Gassmann substitution, a fault-detection training set for
machine learning, a 4D time-lapse over a CO₂ plume, and a finite-difference wave
propagation lab. Also ours.
Open data
Real field data you can practice on, released for exactly that purpose.
- Volveequinor.com
- Equinor's complete dataset from a real North Sea field: seismic, well logs,
production data, and reports. The closest thing to sitting at an operator's
workstation without the badge.
- SEG Open Data catalogwiki.seg.org
- The SEG Wiki's running catalog of open seismic datasets, from classic 2D lines to
full 3D surveys, with notes on what each one is good for.
- TerraNubisterranubis.com
- Free seismic volumes ready to load into OpendTect, including F3, the Dutch North
Sea survey that has taught a generation of interpreters.
Communities
Learning alone is the slow way. These are the rooms where practitioners answer
questions from people who are where you are now.
- Software Undergroundsoftwareunderground.org
- The community for people who work on the digital subsurface: an active forum,
recorded tutorials from its Transform events, and a genuinely welcoming culture for
beginners who code.
- r/geophysicsreddit.com
- Career questions, study advice, and technical discussion. Search it before asking;
most beginner questions have been answered well at least once.
Maintained by the OgbonLab team. Last reviewed July 2026; every link
above returned a live page at review time. Know a free resource that belongs here?
Tell us at lab@ogbonlab.com. Teaching a course?
There is a page for educators too.