SUBSIDENCE — 1D burial history and backstripping

A desktop tool for reconstructing sedimentary basin subsidence from well data

Created by Stepan Vygovskiy

SUBSIDENCE is a local application for 1D burial history analysis and tectonic subsidence / backstripping. It runs entirely on your machine — no cloud, no account required. Import well logs and formation tops, build a stratigraphic framework, assign lithology parameters, and reconstruct how sedimentary layers were buried and compacted through geological time.

Current functionality includes:

• stratigraphic picking directly inside the application
• handling of formation thicknesses, erosional intervals, and hiatuses
• sea-level curve support
• single-well and multi-well subsidence chart comparison
• reconstruction and truncation at selected geological times
• built-in stratigraphic charts
• built-in lithology properties and compaction presets
• support for user-defined sea-level curves, StratCharts, lithologies, and compaction presets

The software is still under active development, but the foundation for future decompaction, tectonic subsidence, and backstripping workflows is already included.

---

---

Scientific basis

The backstripping and decompaction engine is built on:

• Athy (1930) exponential porosity-depth model — decompaction functions adapted from PyBasin (Luijendijk, University of Bergen; doi:10.1029/2010JB008071)
• Airy backstripping burial history loop — algorithm pattern from Stratya2D (Harikrishnan Nalina Kumar)
• Sea level curves — Haq composite, Van der Meer et al. (2017), Kocsis & Scotese (2020), Verard (2015); binned data from Kocsis & Scotese (2022), Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology
• Lithology SVG patterns — Equinor lithology-patterns (MIT)

Reference implementations are in repos/.

---

Getting started

See INSTALL.md for full setup instructions (Python venv + npm).

---

Running the app

Terminal 1 — backend:

# Windows
.\.venv\Scripts\Activate.ps1
$env:PYTHONPATH = "$PWD\app\src"
uvicorn subsidence.api.main:app --host 127.0.0.1 --port 8000

Terminal 2 — frontend:

cd frontend
npm run dev -- --host 127.0.0.1

Open http://127.0.0.1:5173 in a browser.

---

How it works

1. Create or open a project — stored as a .subsidence folder on disk (SQLite + Parquet files).
2. Import well data — LAS log curves, formation tops (CSV), deviation surveys.
3. Build a stratigraphic framework — create a shared marker set (TopSet) with named horizons; optionally link to a regional stratigraphic chart.
4. Configure zones — assign lithology fractions and compaction model parameters (porosity, grain density, compaction coefficient) per stratigraphic zone.
5. Run backstripping — the engine decompacts each zone, removes water and sediment load, and reconstructs tectonic subsidence through geological time.
6. Explore results — view burial and subsidence curves per well, or compare across multiple wells on a shared age axis.

---

Known issues and development status

Active bugs and open work items are tracked in docs/contracts/.

---

Authors and acknowledgements

Stepan Vygovskiy — conception, design, and development.

Built with Claude (Anthropic) and Codex (OpenAI).

Free to use for scientific and commercial purposes — see LICENSE.

---

Documentation

• Architecture overview
• Codebase map
• Documentation index
• Backend source: app/src/subsidence
• Frontend source: frontend/src