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Explorer Division Column EMD

I am pleased to serve as president of the Energy Minerals Division for 2018-19. My main goals for this year are to provide frequent, easily accessible, relevant, high-quality technical content, and to improve our member engagement and communication with the regions, local societies and other geological associations.

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Explorer Director’s Corner

If you attended the AAPG Annual Convention and Exhibition in Salt Lake City this year, you may have noticed additional signs in the hallways and slides shown in the opening and technical sessions that introduced the AAPG Code of Conduct. It’s a new element for ACE and it’s something we care about in our desire to foster an environment that allows our attendees to best realize their professional goals. This month I’d like to share with you how it came to be, and more importantly, why.

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American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Explorer President’s Column

The petroleum industry plays a critical role in sustainable energy development. Oil and natural gas production underpins the global economy, promotes energy security, enriches communities and enables environmental stewardship.

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Explorer Emphasis Article

Exploration and development drilling along the upper region of the Middle Pennsylvanian Red Fork Sandstone has been going on since 1979 in the western part of the Anadarko basin of Oklahoma. Fangyu Li, a postdoctoral research associate in the College of Engineering at the University of Georgia, said the latest technology in multispectral coherence is developing to a point where scientists can see more of what’s down there and they can see it more clearly.

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American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Explorer Article

Bid rounds, new technologies and the region’s energy future will be topics of discussion at the Energy Opportunities Conference, Exhibition and Business-to-Business Session in Cartagena, Colombia from Aug. 22-23. “We are moving beyond our technical arena to explore regulatory aspects, industry-government collaboration, industry- community relations, plus looking to the future of alternative energy and technologies,” said Victor Vega, Latin America and Caribbean Region immediate past president and general vice chair for Energy Opportunities.

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American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Latin America Blog

Bid rounds, new technologies and the region’s energy future will be topics of discussion at the Energy Opportunities Conference, Exhibition and Business-to-Business Session in Cartagena, Colombia from Aug. 22-23. “We are moving beyond our technical arena to explore regulatory aspects, industry-government collaboration, industry- community relations, plus looking to the future of alternative energy and technologies,” said Victor Vega, Latin America and Caribbean Region immediate past president and general vice chair for Energy Opportunities.

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American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Explorer Geophysical Corner

“Big data” and “data analytics” are the buzzwords these days. In the last decade, our industry grappled not only with ever-larger volumes of data, but also with increased data heterogeneity. Recent developments in data analytic capabilities applied to other industries hold significant promise for those of working in the hydrocarbon exploration and development.

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Explorer Historical Highlights

Since the early days of petroleum exploration, the industry has met diviners and dowsers who, by using esoteric techniques, simple devices or sophisticated artifacts designed by themselves, have tried to fool companies by claiming they were able to detect oil in the subsurface. In France, during the late 1970s, two eccentric inventors claimed they could directly detect oil in the subsurface from an exceptional device mounted on board an airplane, resulting in one of the most famous frauds in petroleum exploration history.

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American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Explorer Emphasis Article

If a taint exists on the use of geophysics to evaluate fracturing operations, it is this: ‘T ain’t easy. In fact it’s downright difficult, said Arash Dahi Taleghani, associate professor of petroleum and natural gas engineering in the Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering at Penn State University, whose research areas include studying how natural fractures can affect hydraulic-fracture geometry and using seismic for modeling natural fractures and post-treatment fracture analysis.

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American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Explorer Article

News reports and editorials about human- caused climate change are a daily feature of modern life, as politicians, environmental activists and industry leaders grapple over how to mitigate or avert the expected global catastrophe to ensue. Gregory R. Wrightstone takes a different view.

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
DL Abstract

Climate change is not only happening in the atmosphere but also in the anthroposphere; in some ways the former could drive or exacerbate the latter, with extreme weather excursions and extreme excursions from societal norms occurring all over the earth. Accomplishing geoscience for a common goal – whether that is for successful business activities, resource assessment for public planning, mitigating the impacts of geological hazards, or for the sheer love of furthering knowledge and understanding – can and should be done by a workforce that is equitably developed and supported. Difficulty arises when the value of institutional programs to increase equity and diversity is not realized.

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Request a visit from Sherilyn Williams-Stroud!

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
DL Abstract

For well over a century there have been conflicting indications of the strength of the crust and of faults and what controls them.  Much of our ignorance comes quite naturally from the general inaccessibility of the crust to measurement--in contrast with our understanding of the atmosphere, which is much more accessible to observation as well as more rapidly changing.  Crustal strength is best understood in deforming sedimentary basins where the petroleum industry has made great contributions, particularly in deforming petroleum basins because of the practical need to predict. In this talk we take a broad look at key issues in crustal strength and deformation and what we can learn from boreholes, earthquakes, active fault systems, and toy models.

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Request a visit from John Suppe!

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
DL Abstract

Engineering of wind farms, development of carbon sequestration projects in shelfal waters, the proliferation of communication cables that connect the world, all of these things suggest that it is time to re-examine what we know about shelf processes both updip-to-downdip and along shoreline, and the influence of shelf processes on erosion and transport of sediments.

Request a visit from Lesli Wood!

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
VG Abstract

The Betic hinterland, in the westernmost Mediterranean, constitutes a unique example of a stack of metamorphic units. Using a three-dimensional model for the crustal structure of the Betics-Rif area this talk will address the role of crustal flow simultaneously to upper-crustal low-angle faulting in the origin and evolution of the topography.

Request a visit from Juan I. Soto!

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
DL Abstract

Local sea-level changes are not simply a function of global ocean volumes but also the interactions between the solid Earth, the Earth’s gravitational field and the loading and unloading of ice sheets. Contrasting behaviors between Antarctica and Scotland highlight how important the geologic structure beneath the former ice sheets is in determining the interactions between ice sheets and relative sea levels.

Request a visit from Alex Simms!

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
DL Abstract

Fossil hominin footprints offer a unique and immediate snapshot of our ancestors' lives, capturing their ecological, environmental, and behavioral contexts over remarkably short time scales. This presentation delves into the discovery and analysis of over 400 human footprints from Engare Sero, Tanzania, located on the southern shore of Lake Natron.

Request a visit from Cynthia Liutkus-Pierce!

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
VG Abstract

In comparison with the known boundary conditions that promote salt deformation and flow in sedimentary basins, the processes involved with the mobilization of clay-rich detrital sediments are far less well established. This talk will use seismic examples in different tectonic settings to document the variety of shale geometries that can be formed under brittle and ductile deformations.

Request a visit from Juan I. Soto!

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
DL Abstract

Around 170 million years ago, the Gulf of Mexico basin flooded catastrophically, and the pre-existing landscape, which had been a very rugged, arid, semi-desert world, was drowned beneath an inland sea of salt water. The drowned landscape was then buried under kilometers of salt, perfectly preserving the older topography. Now, with high-quality 3D seismic data, the salt appears as a transparent layer, and the details of the drowned world can be seen in exquisite detail, providing a unique snapshot of the world on the eve of the flooding event. We can map out hills and valleys, and a system of river gullies and a large, meandering river system. These rivers in turn fed into a deep central lake, whose surface was about 750m below global sea level. This new knowledge also reveals how the Louann Salt was deposited. In contrast to published models, the salt was deposited in a deep water, hypersaline sea. We can estimate the rate of deposition, and it was very fast; we believe that the entire thickness of several kilometers of salt was laid down in a few tens of thousands of years, making it possibly the fastest sustained deposition seen so far in the geological record.

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Request a visit from Frank Peel!

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
DL Abstract

Physics is an essential component of geophysics but there is much that physics cannot know or address. 

Request a visit from John Castagna!

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
DL Abstract

Paleozoic North America has experienced multiple mountain building events, from Ordovician to Permian, on all margins of the continent. These have had a profound effect on the resulting complex basins and their associated petroleum systems. Subsequent uplift, erosion and overprinting of these ancient systems impedes the direct observation of their tectonic history. However, the basin sedimentary records are more complete, and provide additional insights into the timing and style of the mountain building events. In this study, we employ ~90 1D basin models, ~30 inverse flexural models, isopachs, and paleogeographic maps to better understand the Paleozoic history of North America.

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Request a visit from Kurt W. Rudolph!

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)

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