About the project — Fatiando a Terra

Fatiando a Terra is a community-developed collection of open-source Python packages aimed primarily at Geophysics (though not exclusively). Our tools are developed by working geoscientists and volunteers from across the globe.
Trivia: Fatiando a Terra is Portuguese for Slicing the Earth, a reference to the project’s Brazilian origins and ambitious initial goals to model the whole planet.
The organization structure of Fatiando is outlined in our Governance document. It specifies the existing roles within our community, what are the responsibilities assigned to each one, and how to gain responsibilities within our organization.
Below is a list of the people currently occupying each role and the ones who served previously.
Project Leaders: Leonardo Uieda, Santiago Soler.
Package Maintainers: Leonardo Uieda (verde, pooch, harmonica, boule, bordado, magali, ensaio), Santiago Soler (harmonica, choclo, pooch), Matt Tankersley (harmonica).
Package Authors: The GitHub repositories for each library contain AUTHORS.md files which list everyone who is considered an author of that library. Our Authorship Guidelines define the rules for attributing authorship.
Project Founders: Vanderlei C. Oliveira Jr, Jose Fernando Caparica Jr, André Lopes Ferreira, Henrique Bueno dos Santos, Leonardo Uieda.
Former Steering Council: Agustina Pesce, Leonardo Uieda, Lu Li, Mariana Gomez, Santiago Soler.
Take part in our community: Open-source is more than just code, it’s about the people involved. One of the most impactful ways in which you can help is by being involved in the project!
Development and maintenance of the Fatiando a Terra project is generously supported by:
Fatiando is a part of the larger family of geophysics free software in Python, which has grown tremendously since we started development in 2010:
We design our software to complement what is offered in other packages. Check them out as well!
The Fatiando a Terra project had its start around 2008 as a C++ program to perform geophysical modeling of various data types (gravity, magnetics, seismic, etc.). At least that was what a small group of Geophysics undergraduate students at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, set out to do. Unsurprisingly, this overly ambitious goal was never achieved.
In 2010, we started developing the fatiando Python library, which included several state-of-the-art methods for forward modeling and inversion of gravity and magnetic data, as well as toy problems in other fields useful for teaching. Development of this library was discontinued in 2018 as our focus shifted to our newer and more well-scoped libraries. This blog post announcing the shift explains the reasoning behind this decision.
Legacy version: The last version that was released of fatiando is v0.5. The documentation for it can still be accessed at legacy.fatiando.org.
We also gave a few talks that cover some of the history of the project, many of which are recorded and up on our YouTube channel!
Last updated: 2026-11-13. Created using Nēnē v0.10.0. Source code for this website: fatiando/website (commit 7c1b07a).
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