# Alt Earth > Alt Earth builds AI for Earth Sciences. It combines machine learning with geophysics, geochemistry, remote sensing, laboratory analysis and field experimentation to reconstruct the Earth's subsurface in 3D, together with the geological processes and history that shaped it. Its scientific mission is to develop Natural General Intelligence: AI that learns from the Earth itself. The whole website is a single page (https://alt.earth/) with three sections: Home (#home), Research (#research) and Join Us (#join-us). Each open role has its own page under /jobs/. ## What Alt Earth does - Thesis: the Earth's natural systems cannot be learned from the internet alone. They require models that stay in contact with the physical world, observing, forming hypotheses, testing against reality and recalibrating, as weather forecasting already does. - Approach: interdisciplinary teams of Earth scientists, ML engineers, applied mathematicians and on-ground operators; lab infrastructure at generational scale; widely deployed sensors generating high-quality labelled data; models trained by deploying them in the physical world. - Track record: the team began with carbon removal through Enhanced Rock Weathering (ERW), running field operations in Darjeeling, India, with its own laboratory infrastructure. Thousands of soil samples informed models that guided interventions, and about 10,000 tonnes of CO2 have been removed to date. Carbon removal continues at Alt Carbon: https://altcarbon.com/ - Current focus: the subsurface, which underpins minerals and energy systems, carbon and waste storage, and many natural hazards. Reconstructing it from sparse observations is an inverse problem at planetary scale. Applications include discovering minerals for the energy transition, developing geothermal resources, storing carbon and assessing geological risk. ## Research problems Mineral exploration has a success rate below 0.5%, and copper, lithium, nickel and cobalt alone need on the order of 1,000 additional deposits by 2050. Alt Earth works on: - Probabilistic inversion at depth: amortised posterior inference over density, susceptibility, chargeability and conductivity for million-cell models at 200–1,000 m depth. - From geophysics to ore: multi-physics joint inversion of magnetics, gravity, IP, MT and borehole petrophysics through a shared latent geology. - Generative priors for ore systems: score-based and flow priors over 3D structure and mineralisation for porphyry, IOCG, VMS and magmatic Ni–Cu–PGE systems, conditioned on drillholes. - Prospectivity from positive-unlabelled data: bias-corrected PU learning with roughly a hundred known positives and spatially blocked validation. - Foundation model for drill core: multimodal self-supervised encoders over hyperspectral core scans, core imagery and multi-element assays. - Simulating ore-forming systems at scale: neural-operator surrogates for coupled heat, fluid flow and reaction in magmatic-hydrothermal systems. - World models for ore systems and drilling: action-conditioned generative simulators of the subsurface, with planners that choose drilling sequences. ## Academic grants Alt Earth funds academic labs, researchers and students working on these research problems, including bold, early-stage ideas. To explore upcoming grants, write to gondwana@altcarbon.com. ## Team - Sourav Ganguly — Geology & Isotope Geochemistry; postdoc, Weizmann Institute - Sambuddha Misra — Chemical Oceanography; postdoc, University of Cambridge; faculty, Indian Institute of Science - Pawan Bharadwaj — Applied Maths & Geophysics; postdoc, MIT; faculty, Indian Institute of Science - Matthew Morris-Cave — Computational Petrology; PhD, University of Cambridge - Adrian Marin Mag — Geophysics & Seismology; PhD, University of Oxford - Aalok Thakkar — Scientific Intelligence; PhD, University of Pennsylvania; ex-AWS, Bell Labs - Abhishek Kumar — Deep Learning; ex-Zomato, Sylvera - Sanjutha Indrajit — Multimodal Earth Intelligence; ex-SatSure - Leander Cibi — Geospatial Data Infrastructure; ex-SatSure - Ishan Ambasta — Applied Research; BITS Pilani - Miaozhou Tang — Computational Geophysics; Imperial College London - Arya Tilak — Geochemistry; University of Houston - Sanket Bajad — Computational Geophysics; PhD, Indian Institute of Science - Meesha Chotai — Chemistry; Ashoka University - Akhtar Jahan — Geochemistry; PhD, IIT Roorkee - Usman Khan — Hydrogeochemistry; PhD, IIT Roorkee - Sankhadip Poyra — Geology; Presidency University - Dhrupad Suhalka — Exploration Ops; IIT Dhanbad; ex-SLB, Cairn O&G - Mahananda Sengupta — Applied Geology; IIT Dhanbad; ex-Vedanta - Shrey Agarwal — Chemistry; BITS Pilani; Co-founder - Eeshana Aurora — Planetary Sciences; Purdue University - Kavya Kurian — Physics; Delft University of Technology; ex-Alpine F1 - Nikitha Shenoy — Legal; NALSAR; ex-CAM, Khaitan & Co - Adithya Venkatesan — Brand & Marketing; ex-Meesho, Gojek, Zepto - Amritha Sreekumar — Creative & Design; University of the Arts London; ex-Gojek - Sparsh Agarwal — International Climate Law; University of Oxford; Co-founder ## Backers Lachy Groom, Shastra VC, iSeed, Point One Capital, Industrial 47, Awais Ahmed, Utsav Somani, Arjun Ramani, Jason Zhao and Tanmay Bhat. Seed round coverage: https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/21/alt-carbon-scores-12m-seed-to-scale-carbon-removal-in-india/ ## Open roles Roles are based in Cambridge, UK. Alt Earth also welcomes applications from exceptional people whose skills are not covered by a listed role. ### Earth Sciences - [Structural Geologist, 3D Modelling](https://alt.earth/jobs/structural-geologist.html): builds 3D structural models from mapping, oriented core and geophysics, and turns structural knowledge into priors for generative geology models. - [Exploration Geologist, Field & Drilling](https://alt.earth/jobs/exploration-geologist.html): generates and tests targets in the field, designs and supervises drilling, and feeds every result back into the models (Cambridge, UK, with extended field time in India). - [Applied Mathematician](https://alt.earth/jobs/applied-mathematician.html): Bayesian inversion in function space, spatial statistics and Bayesian experimental design. - [Research Intern, Earth Sciences](https://alt.earth/jobs/earth-sciences-research-internships.html): field, lab and modelling projects in geology, geophysics and geochemistry for PhD, Master's and exceptional undergraduate students. ### Data & Engineering - [Head of Geospatial Data](https://alt.earth/jobs/head-of-geospatial-data.html): owns acquisition, representation and QA/QC of heterogeneous subsurface data; builds and leads the data team. - [Backend Engineer, Geospatial Platform](https://alt.earth/jobs/backend-software-engineer.html): builds the subsurface data platform, model-serving APIs and offline-first field data tools. ### Machine Learning - [ML Engineer](https://alt.earth/jobs/ml-engineer.html): two openings: Track A, representation learning on Earth observation and drill-core data; Track B, generative and probabilistic inference. - [Research Scientist, Foundation Models](https://alt.earth/jobs/research-scientist.html): leads research on foundation models, generative 3D geology, world models and physics-informed learning. - [Research Scientist, RL & Planning](https://alt.earth/jobs/rl-planning-researcher.html): model-based RL, MCTS and POMDPs to decide where to drill next by planning inside the world model. - [Scientific Computing Engineer, Simulation & Inversion](https://alt.earth/jobs/scientific-computing-engineer.html): GPU PDE solvers, adjoints at scale, and millions of simulated ore systems as training data. - [ML Infrastructure Engineer, Training & Compute](https://alt.earth/jobs/ml-infrastructure-engineer.html): distributed training, the compute cluster, experiment tracking and model serving. - [Research Intern, Machine Learning](https://alt.earth/jobs/research-internships.html): scoped ML research projects for PhD, Master's and exceptional undergraduate students. ## Offices & Labs - Cambridge, UK: Nine Hills Road (most roles are based here) - Bangalore, India: iHub, IISc - Darjeeling, India: D-CAL (field operations) ## Contact Write to us: gondwana@altcarbon.com (research collaborations, data partnerships and job applications) ## Links - [Website](https://alt.earth/) - [Natural General Intelligence](https://naturalgeneralintelligence.ai/) - [Alt Carbon](https://altcarbon.com/)