Page 230 - Fundamentals of Computational Geoscience Numerical Methods and Algorithms

Summary Statements

As an amalgamation of traditional geoscience and contemporary computational
science, computational geoscience has become an emerging discipline in the past
decade. On the one hand, computational geoscience provides geoscientists with
useful modern scientific tools for revealing dynamic processes and mechanisms
behind the field observations of complicated and complex geoscience phenomena,
but on the other hand, it provides computational scientists with challenging
problems of large scales and multiple processes. In addition to the well-known
experimental and theoretical analysis methods, computational simulation has
become a third dominating and indispensable scientific method for solving a broad
range of scientific and engineering problems. Without computational simulation,
it is impossible to solve geoscience problems at a high lever of understanding the
intrinsic dynamic processes and mechanisms that lead to the oberserved geoscience
phenomena in nature.
Owing to the broad and diversity characteristics of geoscience problems, a typ-
ical kind of geoscience problem, known as ore body formation and mineralization
in hydrothermal systems within the upper crust of the Earth, has been considered
to deal with the computational aspects of recent developments of computational
geoscience. Toward this end, advanced numerical methods, procedures and algo-
rithms have been systematically presented in this monograph. Through applying
these numerical methods, procedures and algorithms to some specific aspects of
ore body formation and mineralization, the following conclusions have been drawn
from the research work reported in the monograph.

(1) The newly-developed computational geoscience discipline is obviously of
multi-disciplinary nature crossing many fields of science such as mathematics,
physics, chemistry, computational science, geoscience and so forth. The ulti-
mate aim of computational geoscience is to deal with the origin, history and
behaviours of the Earth system in a scientific and predictive manner. The
research methodology of computational geoscience is a comprehensive research
methodology, which is formed by combining field observation, theoretical anal-
ysis, numerical simulation and field validation. The primary aim of using this
research methodology is to investigate the dynamic processes and mechanisms

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