News of the month

/

A quick round-up of recent news. If you think we missed something, drop us a line!

EAGE gets more global

The annual EAGE conference and buzzword-fest in Copenhagen was the largest ever, with over 6200 delegates. The organization is getting ever more global, having just signed memorandums of understanding with both AAPG and SEG — getting this done was a big cap-feather for John Underhill, who stepped down as president at the end of the week.

The most popular session of the conference was Creativity & Boldness in Exploration, organized by Jean-Jacques Jarrige of Total. At least 800 people crammed into the auditorium, causing exhibition-floor vendors to complain that 'everything has gone quiet'.

Microsoft gets more social... maybe

Most of our knowledge sharing clients have dabbled with social media. Chat is more or less ubiquitous, wikis are extremely popular, and microblogging is taking off. Yammer is one of the disrupters here, and it seemed almost inevitable that they would be acquired. How dull to hear that Microsoft seems to be the main suitor. They need something to work in this space, but have struggled so far. 

Find your digital objects!

Science is benefitting every day from social media, as conversations happen on Twitter and elsewhere. Sharing data, methods, photos, and figures is fun and helps grow stronger communities. Figshare is a still-new place to share graphics and data, and its acquisition by Macmillan's Digital Science business gave it more clout earlier this year. It now offers a Digital Object Identifier, also known as a DOI, for every item you upload. This is as close to a guarantee of persistence as you can get on the web, and it's a step closer to making everything citable in tomorrow's scientific literature.

Forecast is for cloud

One of the buzzwords at EAGE was 'the cloud' as companies fall over each other trying to get in on the action. Halliburton has had a story for years, but we think the giants will struggle in this space—the ones to watch are the startups. FUSE are one of the more convincing outfits, dragging E&P data management into the 21st century.

In other news

Touch is coming to E&P. Those lovely interfaces on your phone and tablet are, slowly but surely, getting traction in subsurface geoscience as Schlumberger teams up with Perceptive Pixel to bring a 27" multi-touch interface to Petrel. 

Thank goodness you're a geoscientist! Geophysics is one of the most employable degrees, according to a report last year by Georgetown University that's been covered lots since. Our impression: the more quantitative you are, the more employable.

This regular news feature is for information only. We aren't connected with any of these organizations, and don't necessarily endorse their products or services. 

News of the month

/

Welcome to our more-or-less regular new post. Seen something awesome? Get in touch!

Convention time!

Next week is Canada's annual petroleum geoscience party, the CSPG–CSEG–CWLS GeoConvention. Thousands of applied geoscientists will descend on Calgary's downtown Telus Convention Centre to hear about the latest science and technology in the oilfield, and catch up with old friends. We're sad to be missing out this year — we hope someone out there will be blogging!

GeoConvention highlights

There are more than fifty technical sessions at the conference this year. For what it's worth, these are the presentations we'd be sitting in the front row for if we were going:

Now run to the train and get to the ERCB Core Research Centre for...

Guided fault interpretation

We've seen automated fault interpretation before, and now Transform have an offering too. A strongly tech-focused company, they have a decent shot at making it work in ordinary seismic data — the demo shows a textbook example:

GPU processing on the desktop

On Monday Paradigm announced their adoption of NVIDIA's Maximus technology into their desktop applications. Getting all gooey over graphics cards seems very 2002, but this time it's not about graphics — it's about speed. Reserving a Quadro processor for graphics, Paradigm is computing seismic attributes on a dedicated Tesla graphics processing unit, or GPU, rather than on the central processing unit (CPU). This is cool because GPUs are massively parallel and are much, much faster at certain kinds of computation because they don't have the process management, I/O, and other overheads that CPUs have. This is why seismic processing companies like CGGVeritas are adopting them for imaging. Cutting edge stuff!

In other news...

This regular news feature is for information only. We aren't connected with any of these organizations, and don't necessarily endorse their products or services. 

News of the month

/

A few bits of news about geology, geophysics, and technology in the hydrocarbon and energy realm. Do drop us a line if you hear of something you think we ought to cover.

All your sequence strat

The SEPM, which today calls itself the Society for Sedimentary Geology (not the Society of Economic Palaeontologists and Mineralogists, which is where the name comes from, IIRC), has upgraded its website. It looks pretty great (nudge nudge, AAPG!). The awesome SEPM Strata, a resource for teaching and learning sequence stratigraphy, also got a facelift. 

Hat-tip to Brian Romans for this one.

Giant sand volcano

Helge Løseth of Statoil, whom we wrote about last week in connection with the Source Rocks from Seismic workflow, was recently in the news again. This time he and his exploration team were describing the Pleistocene extrusion of more than 10 km3 of sand onto the sea-floor in the northern North Sea, enough to bury Manhattan in 160 m of sand.

The results are reported in Løseth, H, N Rodrigues, and P Cobbold (2012) and build on earlier work by the same team (Rodrigues et al. 2009). 

Tape? There's still tape??

Yes, there's still tape. This story just caught my eye because I had no idea people were still using tape. It turns out that the next generation of tape, Ultrium LTO-6, will be along in the second half of 2012. The specs are pretty amazing: 8 TB (!) of compressed data, and about 200 MB/s (that's megabytes) transfer rates. The current generation of cartridges, LTO-5, cost about $60 and hold 3 TB — a similar-performing hard drive will set you back more than double that. 

The coolest cluster

Physics enables geophysics in lots of cool ways. CGGVeritas is using a 600 kW Green Revolution Cooling CarnotJet liquid cooling system to refrigerate 24 cluster racks in GRC's largest installation to date. In the video below, you can see an older 100 kW system. The company claims that these systems, in which the 40°C racks sit bathed in non-conductive oil, reduce the cost of cooling a supercomputer by about 90%... pretty amazing.

Awesomer still, this server is using Supermicro's SuperServer GPU-accelerated servers. GPUs, or graphics processing units, have massively parallel architectures (over 1000 cores per server), and can perform some operations much faster than ordinary CPUs, which are engineered to perform 'executive' functions as well as just math.

This regular news feature is for information only. We aren't connected with any of these organizations, and don't necessarily endorse their products or services. The cartridge image is licensed CC-BY-SA by Wikimedia Commons user andy_hazelbury. The CarnotJet image is from grcooling.com and thought to be fair use.

News of the month

/

News of the week was maybe a little ambitious, so we're going to scale back to a monthly post. The same sort of news — technology with subsurface application. Whatever catches our beady eyes, really. Seen something cool? Tip us off.

First, a quick plug. Matt's writing course is on offer again at the CSPG-CSEG-CWLS GeoConvention in Calgary in May. It's a technical writing course, but it's not really about technical writing—it's about get more people writing more stuff. For fun, for science, for whatever. See the conspicuous ad (right) for more info. 

OK, two quick plugs. Dropbox just updated their web interface. If you're not a Dropbox user already, you are missing out on an amazing file storage and transfer tool. Files are accessible from anywhere, and can be shared with a simple web link. We use it every single day for personal and project stuff. Get an account here or click on the illusion.

The technology is coming

A few weeks ago we posted a video of a new augmented reality monocle. Now, news is growing that Google's mysterious X lab is developing some similar-sounding glasses. The general idea is that they connect to your Android phone for communications services, and sit on your face labeling things in the real world, in real time. Labeling with ads, presumably.

As the new iPad now totes a screen with more pixels than the monitor you’re looking at, it’s clear that mobile devices are changing everything there is to change about computing. 

Another SGI ICE, NASA's Pleiades is one of the top ten clusters in the world at 1.4 Pflops. It has a staggering 191TB of memory. Image: NASA.

Not a total flop

Remember SGI? You know, giant blue refrigeratory thing with 12GB of RAM in the back of the viz room, cost about $1M? Completely wiped out by the Linux PC about 10 years ago? Well, not completely: SGI just sold to  Total E&P a giant computer. Much bigger than a refrigerator, and much more expensive than $1M. At 2.3 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point operations per second) this new ICE X machine will be easily one of the most powerful computers in the world.

If the press release is anything to go by, and it probably isn't, Total seems to have reservoir modeling in mind, not just seismic processing. I wonder if they have a mixing board yet? 

Nova Scotia deepwater on fire

Not literally, but there's a small new flame at any rate. Shell Canada went large in January's bid round on four deepwater blocks off Nova Scotia, committing to almost $1B in exploration expenditures over the next five years. They won parcels 1 to 4 for $1.8M, $303M, $235M, $430M respectively, totalling $970M. This is terrific news for Nova Scotia, and for Canada.

This regular news feature is for information only. We aren't connected with any of these organizations, and don't necessarily endorse their products or services. SGI and ICE X are registered trademarks of Silicon Graphics International Corp. The psychobox illusion is a trademark of Dropbox.com. Offshore Nova Scotia map modified from CNSOPB.

News of the week

/

Our regularly irregular news column returns! If you come across geoscience–tech tidbits, please drop us a line. 

A new wiki for geophysics

If you know Agile*, you know we like wikis, so this is big news. Very quietly, the SEG recently launched a new wiki, seeded with thousands of pages of content from Bob Sheriff's famous Encyclopedic Dictionary of Applied Geophysics. So far, it is not publicly editable, but the society is seeking contributors and editors, so if you're keen, get involved. 

On the subject of wikis, others are on the horizon: SPE and AAPG also have plans. Indeed members of SEG and AAPG were invited to take a survey on 'joint activities' this week. There's a clear opportunity for unity here — which was the original reason for starting our own subsurfwiki.org. The good news is that these systems are fully compatible, so whatever we build separately today can easily be integrated tomorrow. 

The DISC is coming

The SEG's Distinguished Instructor Short Course is in its 15th year and kicks off in 10 days in Brisbane. People rave about these courses, though I admit I felt like I'd been beaten about the head with the wave equation for seven hours after one of them (see if you can guess which one!). This year, the great Chris Liner (University of Houston prof and ex-editor of Geophysics) goes on the road with Elements of Seismic Dispersion: A somewhat practical guide to frequency-dependent phenomena. I'm desperate to attend, as frequency is one of my favourite subjects. You can view the latest schedule on Chris's awesome blog about geophysics, which you should bookmark immediately.

Broadband bionic eyes

Finally, a quirky story about human perception and bandwidth, both subjects close to Agile's core. Ex-US Air Force officer Alek Komar, suffering from a particularly deleterious cataract, had a $23k operation to replace the lens in one eye with a synthetic lens. One side-effect, apart from greater acuity of vision: he can now see into the ultraviolet.

If only it was that easy to get more high frequencies out of seismic data; the near-surface 'cataract' is not as easily excised.

This regular news feature is for information only. We aren't connected with any of these organizations, and don't necessarily endorse their products or services. 

News of the week

/

Some news from the last fortnight or so. Things seem to be getting going again after the winter break. If you see anything you think our readers would be interested in, please get in touch. 

Shale education

Penn State University have put together an interactive infographic on the Marcellus Shale development in Pennsylvania. My first impression was that it was pro-industry. On reflection, I think it's quite objective, if idealized. As an industry, we need to get away from claims like "fracking fluid is 99% water" and "shale gas developments cover only 0.05% of the state". They may be true, but they don't give the whole story. Attractive, solid websites like this can be part of fixing this.

New technology

This week all the technlogy news has come from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. It's mostly about tablets this year, it seems. Seems reasonable—we have been seeing them everywhere recently, even in the workplace. Indeed, the rumour is that Schlumberger is buying lots of iPads for field staff.

So what's new in tech? Well, one company has conjured up a 10-finger multi-touch display, bringing the famous Minority Report dream a step closer. I want one of these augmented reality monocles. Maybe we will no longer have to choose between paper and digital!

Geophysical magic?

A tiny press story piqued our interest. Who can resist the lure of Quantum Resonance Interferometry? Well, apparently some people can, because ViaLogy has yet to turn a profit, but we were intrigued. What is QRI? ViaLogy's website is not the most enlightening source of information—they really need some pictures!—but they seem to be inferring signal from subtle changes in noise. In our opinion, a little more openness might build trust and help their business. 

New things to read

Sometimes we check out the new and forthcoming books in Amazon. Notwithstanding their nonsensical prices, a few caught our eye this week:

Detect and Deter: Can Countries Verify the Nuclear Test Ban? Dahlman, et al, December 2011, Springer, 281 pages, $129. I've been interested in nuclear test monitoring since reading about the seismic insights of Tukey, Bogert, and others at Bell Labs in the 1960s. There's geophysics, nuclear physics and politics in here.

Deepwater Petroleum Exploration & Production: A Nontechnical Guide Leffler, et al, October 2011, Pennwell, 275 pages, $79. This is the second edition of this book by ex-Shell engineer Bill Leffler, aimed at a broad industry audience. There are new chapters on geoscience, according to the blurb.

Petrophysics: Theory and Practice of Measuring Reservoir Rock and Fluid Transport Properties Tiab and Donaldson, November 2011, Gulf Professional Publishing, 971 pages, $180. A five-star book at Amazon, this outrageously priced book is now in its third edition.

This regular news feature is for information only. We aren't connected with any of these organizations, and don't necessarily endorse their products or services. Low-res images of book and website considered fair use.

News of the week

/

The news is back! A few stories have caught our beady geoscientific eyes over the last couple of weeks... If you see anything you think we missed, drop us a line!

Spotfire is free*

*kind of. This is huge. One of the limits on adoption of the amazing Spotfire — the best tools we've ever used for data exploration, and a must-have tool for reservoir engineers — has been cost. But TIBCO is now offering Silver Spotfire, cloud-friendly versions for very reasonable dollars, starting at free! So if you have never tried it, now's your chance. It's very easy: install it, Ctrl-C a data table from MS Excel, and Ctrl-V into Spotfire, and you're away.

World's cheapest Lidar

Most geoscientists are happier holding a pencil than a mouse, so the news of gadgets like tablets coming to subsurface interpretation is always welcome. Though 3D interaction tools like gloves and wands, when they appeared about a decade ago, turned out to be utterly useless, perhaps Microsoft's Kinect can kill the mouse? For example, how about using a sandpit as an input device, like SandyStation?

If you're not sure about that, try this: a glaciologist at the University of California at Santa Cruz used a Kinect as a makeshift Lidar. Though it can only 'see' up to about 5 m, it's extremely fast, accurate, and cheap.

Six years of geo-floss

Geoscientific, free, libre, open source software, or geo-FLOSS, is, like, a 'thing'. The movement continues to grow and blossom at events like the awesome workshop we reported on in June, and the recently announced workshop at the 2012 EAGE Conference and Exhibition next June in Copenhagen. If you work on, use, care about, or are just curious about open source software in exploration geoscience, then we hope to see you there.

This regular news feature is for information only. We aren't connected with any of these organizations, and don't necessarily endorse their products or services. Image of Spotfire considered fair use.

News of the week

/

Newsworthy items of the last fortnight or so. We look for stories in the space between geoscience and technology, but if you come across anything you think we should cover, do tell. 

CNLOPB map of blocksNewfoundland blocks announced

Back in May we wrote about the offshore licensing round in Newfoundland and Labrador on Canada's Atlantic margin. The result was announced on Wednesday. There was no award on the northern blocks. The two parcels in northwest Newfoundland, in the Gulf of St Lawrence, were awarded to local outfit Ptarmigan Energy for a total work commitment of $2.002 million. The winning bids in the Flemish Pass area were won by a partnership of Statoil (at 50%), Chevron (40%) and Repsol (10%). The bids on these parcels were $202,171,394 and $145,603,270. Such arbitrary-looking numbers suggest that there was some characteristically detailed technical assessment going on at Statoil, or that a game theorist got to engineer the final bid. We'd love to know which. 

CanGeoRef for Canadian literature

CanGeoRef is a new effort to bring Canadian geoscience references in from the cold to the AGI's GeoRef bibliographic database. The Canadian Federation of Earth Sciences is coordinating the addition of literature from the Survey, various provincial and territorial agencies, as well as Canadian universities. Better yet, CanGeoRef has a 30-day free trial offer plus a 15% discount if you subscribe before December. 

In related news, the AGI has updated its famous Glossary of Geology, now in its 5th edition. We love the idea, but don't much like the $100 price tag. 

Tibbr at work

Tibbr logoTibbr is a social media engine for the enterprise, a sort of in-house Facebook. Launched in January by TIBCO, it's noteworthy because of TIBCO's experience; they're the company behind Spotfire among other things. It has some interesting features, like videocalling, voicemail integration and analytics (of course), that should differentiate it from competitors like Yammer. What these tools do for teamwork and integration is yet to be seen. 

The 3D world in 3D

Occasionally you see software you can't wait to get your hands on. When Ron Schott posted this video of some mud-cracks, we immediately started thinking of the possibilities for outcrops, hand specimens, SEM photography,... However, the new 123D Catch software from Autodesk only runs on Windows so Matt hasn't been able to test it yet. On the plus side, it's free, for now at least.

To continue the social media thread, Ron is very interested in its role in geoscience. He's an early adopter of Google+, so if you're interested in how these tools might help you, add him to one of your circles or hangout with him. As for us, we're still finding our way in G+.

This regular news feature is for information only. We aren't connected with any of these people or organizations, and don't necessarily endorse their products or services. Unless we say we think they're great.

News of the week

/

This news feature has settled down into a fortnightly groove. News of the week sounds good, though, so we'll keep the name. Filtered geoscience tech news, every other Friday. Got tips?

Is it hot in here?

Google's philanthropic arm, Google.org, sponsored a major study at Southern Methodist University into the geothermal potential of the United States, and the results are in. This was interesting to us, because we've just spent a couple of weeks working our first geothermal project. Characterizing hot rocks is a fascinating and fairly new application of seismic technology, so it's been as much research exercise as interpretation project. From the looks of this beautiful map—which you must see in Google Earth—seismic may see wide application in the future. 

And the possibilties in Google Earth, along with Google SketchUp, for presenting geospatial data shouldn't go unnoticed!

CLAS arrives in OpendTect

A log analysis plug-in for dGB Earth Science's open-source integrated interpretation tool OpendTect was announced at EAGE conference earlier this year, and now it's available. The tool was developed by Geoinfo, a small Argentinian geoscience tech shop, in partnership with dGB. So now you can compute all your seismic petrophysics right in OpendTect.

On a sort-of-related note, Bert Bril, one of dGB's founders, just launched his blog, I can't believe it's not SCRUM, about agile software development. He even posts about geophysics. Yay!

Agile* apps

We're still regularly updating our completely free apps for Android. If you have an Android phone or tablet, go ahead and give them a spin. Volume* (right) is on version 3.1 already, and now does gas volumetrics, including Bg computation, and can grab any of the major crude oil benchmark prices for a quick-look value. And AVO* is just about to get a boost in functionality with an LMR plot; watch this space. Don't hold back if you've got requests. 

This regular news feature is for information only. We aren't connected with any of these people or organizations, and don't necessarily endorse their products or services. Unless we say we think they're great.

News of the week

/

Help us stay on top of the latest and greatest: if you hear about something that might make geophysics even awesomer for all of us, drop us a line! In the meantime, here's some news that caught our attention...

Free software goodness

Innovative Australian software shop DownUnder GeoSolutions, aka DUG, is now offering DUG Insight to students for free! As if one amazing free (as in beer) seismic visualization and interpretation tool wasn't enough—you do have OpendTect, right?—now there's another. Just email them a copy of your student ID, and they'll get you started. 

NEWSFLASH  Hard-up students might also like this: Nature Geoscience for $10 a year! 

S-ray vision

OK, it doesn't sound quite as cool as X-ray vision, but S-band microwaves really can see through walls. Sort of. Boffins at MIT demonstrate their claims in this video... it's not geophysics, but another hard inverse imaging problem.

Petrophysics for Dummies

Occasionally while wandering lost in the interweb you stumble on gold. This is gold. Graham Davies was a geoscientist at Enterprise Oil, the plucky British independent exploration company I did my first internship at. He's been recording petrophysics tutorials, and they're 100% brilliant. "Even if you've never heard of petrophysics before," claims Davis.

What the heck is the geoblogosphere?

Not really a geotechnical story, but some readers might be interested to know more about geoscience blogs. A recent research paper, Geißler et al 2011, is a good place to start. The authors, who include übergeoblogger Callan Bentley of the structural geology blog Mountain Beltway, do a terrific job of exploraing the reasons for blogging, the perceptions of employers and supervisors, and every other angle you can think of. 

NEWSFLASH The 315th Where on (Google) Earth geomorphological puzzle went unsolved for 11 days, but was finally solved this morning. Congratulations to Ron Schott, the next episode is yours to host.

This regular news feature is for information only. We aren't connected with any of these people or organizations, and don't necessarily endorse their products or services.