Regions and Sections
Eastern Section
For 28 years I taught sedimentology, stratigraphy, structure, and tectonics/ plate tectonics at the University at Buffalo. I performed tons of research which included marine geology in the Pacific, Atlantic and Caribbean, structure/tectonics in Newfoundland and the Taconics, and structure and its control on deposition in the northern Appalachian Basin, and consulted for mines, earthquake concerns, and for oil and gas. A year ago, I semi-retired from the University at Buffalo (still have a few students and teach a few courses a year) and became Director of Special Projects at Nornew, Inc.
During my term as President of the Eastern Section, one of my goals is to promote ideas that others might generate (rather than being a “No” sort of person). It is very important to shepherd these concepts along, and to recognize that not all will be completed during the short tenure we have. So, two new ideas that we are working on at the Eastern Section are:
- Storing all the presentations from the regional meeting on a Web site that is linked to the AAPG Eastern Section Web site. The thoughts and data from the incredible talks at the regional meetings therefore are not lost, but easily accessible. This approach requires no additional work for the presenter, unless the presenter needs to edit proprietary data.
- We are beginning to create a list of potential oil and gas speakers (with potential presentation titles) that will be listed on the Eastern Section Web site so that geology departments may contact these individuals to give presentations. This is similar to the AAPG speaker series, although the Eastern Section cannot, as yet, support the talks monetarily.We will send an email to the geology departments in the Eastern Section to alert them of this service.
In addition, the Imperial Barrel Award Committee, which is headed by Lee Avary, is working hard—we have five teams competing in the regional event, and the committee is attempting to secure funds to support the competition travel costs. In general, the Eastern Section has benefited from the interest generated by the black shales, including, of course, the Marcellus. We hope the regulations get sorted out, and the black shale play does prove to be a blockbuster.