VESIcal is a new tool for calculating solubilities of CO₂-H₂O fluids/vapours in magmatic systems. It provides a powerful interface for many of the most frequently used solubility models, enabling the calculation of saturation pressures, degassing paths, and fluid/melt compositions. The tool leverages the power and flexibility of the python programming language, but most calculations require very little coding experience. In this short workshop we will introduce VESIcal, some of the solubility models that are built into it, and we will demonstrate how fast and easy it is to obtain results, even when using large datasets. 

Workshop Instructors: Simon Matthews (University of Iceland) & Penny Wieser (Oregon State University)

The workshop will take place on Wednesday 12th January 10:00-12:00 GMT on Zoom, as part of the virtual-VMSG meeting programme. Attendees will receive an email from the Geological Society of London with a link to the Zoom meeting. Following the meeting, all the workshop resources will be available at github.com/simonwmatthews/VESIcal_Workshop_VMSG22 including links to the lectures and practical demonstrations.

To participate in the hands-on exercises, you do not need to install anything on your own computer. Instead, all the calculations are performed on a cloud computing server. The only thing you need to access the server is a modern web browser (I find Chrome offers the best performance, but other browsers should work just fine).

Workshop Prerequisites

None! Other than an interest in volatile solubility modelling. You do not need any prior experience with coding (in fact you don’t need this to use VESIcal at all), using computation servers, or anything technical beyond using a web browser. We will show you everything else, and we will be on hang to help you get started.

However, please follow the instructions below before the workshop, and ideally as possible.

Preparation Instructions

1. Go to the server web address provided in the VMSG email from the Geological Society of London (coming on Friday). [Please, please, please do not share this address publicly, otherwise I will have to start manually approving access for each user. To use a long-lived and public version of the server see https://server.enki-portal.org/, but if you do get access to this public server please do not use it for the workshop.]
2. You should see a screen with a large orange button in the middle that says “Sign in with GitLab”. Click this button.
3. If you have a GitLab account already then you can proceed to sign in. If not, please follow the directions to create one, it is free.
4. You should see a loading screen with a progress bar, and then eventually a screen titled “ENKI Server”. You may also get some warning messages appear- it is safe to dismiss these. On the welcome screen click “Close this screen”.
5. You should now see a window with two panes, the larger (right-most) pane having “Launcher” written in the tab. It should look very similar to this screenshot:

NOTE: We are providing access to the server in advance of the workshop so that you can check you can get access to it and solve any problems before the workshop starts. Please do not run calculations on here before the workshop. All computation time costs credits, and we have only a limited quantity available for the workshop. If you want to explore the ENKI-server before the workshop, see http://www.enki-portal.org for more information. Any misuse of the server will result in you being banned from it

For more information about VESIcal…

For more information about VESIcal, see https://vesical.readthedocs.io, or read the VESIcal papers here:

https://doi.org/10.1029/2020EA001584

https://doi.org/10.31223/X5K03T