Field Seminars

Deep-Water Siliciclastic Reservoirs, California

INSTRUCTOR S :

Stephan Graham and Donald R. Lowe, Stanford University, Stanford, California

INSTRUCTOR LOOKUP

DATES:

April 14 - 19, 2013

LOCATION:

Begins in Palo Alto and ends at the airport in San Francisco, California

TUITION:

$2,900.00 Sign Up Now
Goes up to $3100 after 3/15/2013. Includes lodging, transportation during the seminar, lunches, guidebook and group dinner (1 night).
No refunds for cancellations after 3/15/2013.

LIMIT:

20 people

CONTENT:

5.5 CEU What is a CEU?

Objectives

Upon completion of this field seminar, participants will be able to:

• Recognize the spectrum of deep-water siliciclastic facies developed across the full range of deep-water environments, from upper slope to basin plain.
• Understand the processes by which deep-water siliciclastic reservoirs are formed, and how to recognize them in core and in the field.
• Appreciate the origins and nature of heterogeneity in deep-water reservoir facies.
• Use deep-water facies in a predictive manner, while recognizing pitfalls and limitations.

Content

This six-day field seminar is designed to provide participants with an appreciation of the broad range of deep-water reservoir facies, the mechanisms by which they were deposited, their predictive attributes, their reservoir heterogeneity and their stratigraphic architecture. The field school emulates a voyage downslope in a deep-water sedimentary system, from submarine canyon head to mouth, to submarine fan valley, to outer fan, to basin plain, using many of the most outstanding deep-water facies outcrops California has to offer. The field seminar formed the basis for the AAPG Hedberg Conference in 2000.

The field seminar is designed to give participants an understanding of deep-water sedimentary processes and products, as well as a powerful visual impression of the scale and architecture of the full spectrum of deep-water deposits. After gathering on the first evening in Palo Alto, California for a welcome dinner, the second day of the trip brings participants to a common level of understanding of the bed-scale building blocks of deep-water systems through lectures and a core workshop held on the Stanford University campus, with the day ending in Half Moon Bay, California. The morning of the third day reinforces the second day’s lectures by viewing a range of turbidite facies in coastal exposures of San Mateo County. The trip moves south in the afternoon to the Monterey-Carmel area to view the most proximal of deep-water deposits: upper submarine canyon fill exposed in sea-cliff outcrops in Point Lobos State Preserve. The night is spent in Monterey. The morning of the fourth day entails examination (and a field exercise) of a mid-submarine canyon channel-fill exposure at Wagon Caves Rock in the Santa Lucia Range west of King City. In the afternoon, the trip moves east from the Salinas basin, across the San Andreas fault, to a dramatic mountainside cross sectional exposure of a submarine fan channel/levee complex at Juniper Ridge, near Coalinga in the San Joaquin basin. The Juniper Ridge field exercise affords participants an opportunity to understand channel-levee facies relations. After a night in the Coalinga area, the fifth day entails a drive north to see the outcrop sequence represented by the second day’s core exercise in submarine fan-valley fill exposed at Monticello Dam, Lake Berryessa. The final night is spent in Davis, California. The sixth day consists of examination of outer fan and basin plain deposits along Cache Creek, in the Coast Ranges northwest of Davis. The group returns to San Francisco International Airport in the mid-late afternoon.