REGION NEWS
Distinguished Lecturer Tour 2007-08
William Sassi1 and Karen Dotts2 1 Chair of IDL sub-committee, France / 2 AAPG, Tulsa
The rejuvenated aapg.org web site was a very good surprise this summer. The home page became more ergonomic and the Distinguish Lecturers page has definitely an improved layout to gather information quickly on the Distinguished Lecture Program. Resume, titles and abstracts of the Distinguished Lecturers can be collected and downloaded in the most convenient file format. For the European Region, it is hoped that this will facilitate the scheduling of the current 2007-08 tours of Larry C. Peterson (University of Miami, FL) and John J. Walsh (University College Dublin, Ireland). Their lectures are concerned with utmost topics to professionals (industrial and academics) of both environmental geosciences and petroleum geology:
Larry Peterson will speak about the recent history of earth climate. He has done intensive studies of the sedimentary records in anoxic basins spotting the identifications of abrupt changes from high frequency data sets.
John Walsh will give a key-note lecture on the formation and evolution of normal faults. The characteristic time scales that prevail to their formation, growth and reactivation is an important issue in hydrocarbon exploration and production in providing critical understanding of the present and past transfer of fluids, the hydrocarbon migration routes, the generation of overpressures and their role in reservoir compartmentalization.
Both speakers will give outstanding presentations and a great opportunity for professionals and students in petroleum companies as well as in university departments to stimulate work synergy and scientific communication. In this respect any AAPG correspondent to local AAPG affiliated geological societies are more than welcome to offer practical help to promote and disseminate information about the current DL tour.
This autumn, our members of the IDL European sub-committee will examine and ultimately revise the current list of 2008-2009 IDL candidates before they will be asked to submit their quotation marks. A meeting of the sub-committee members will be held during the AAPG International meeting in Athens, Greece. Again, the volunteer contribution of each member of the European Region DL sub-committee will be very well appreciated.
On September 7th, a meeting will be hosted by Andrew Hurst at University of Aberdeen, with Steve Veal (AAPG London’s office), William Sassi and invited AAPG members. This meeting will give the opportunity to discuss on a proposal to organize, on a regular schedule (e.g., monthly or bimonthly), a series of AAPG Exploration Luncheons conferences. The link with the IDL program is that such a conference platform could become instrumental for the arrangement of the itinerary of the IDL, when planned in coordination with Karen Dotts at AAPG in Tulsa, USA. We would like to take a moment to thank Barbara Davis, a retired AAPG employee and a current consultant working with AAPG, for all her hard work arranging all the International Distinguished Lecture tours.
For the IDL European Tour of Larry Peterson and John Walsh, the AAPG European region would be grateful to all members who stand in close contact with affiliate societies to communicate their demand to host the DL for fall 2007 through spring 2008. Their contribution will be so helpful as to finalize the autumn through spring 2008 DL itineraries which will be a repeat of the many potential main sites shown in Figure 1 in addition to newsites. Invitations should be addressed to Karen Dotts (Tulsa) and Steve Veal (London's AAPG office, UK) of the organizing committee of IDL Programme.
Contacts and information are available through the AAPG web pages: www.aapg.org see also http://aapg.org/education/dist_lect/