News of the week

AAPG conference starts on Sunday 

The community of petroleum geoscientists will convene in Houston in a few days for the AAPG 2011 Annual Convention & Exhibition. If any geo-tweeps will be there, spare a thought for those that aren't and update us on the events and happenings with the hashtag #ACE2011. Follow @AAPG_Events or @AAPG on Twitter. Wish we were there!

DownUnder Geosolutions coming up over

Australian based DownUnder GeoSolutions (aka DUG, at DuGeo.com) have recently announced that they will be opening offices in Calgary in May. One of the young entrepreneurs helping build this emerging technology company's was recently featured in Petroleum Exploration Society of Australia's magazine. One to keep an eye on!

CGGV have a new processing centre in Oman

The new CGG Veritas office will focus on onshore seismic acquisition and imaging services for the petroleum industry. The centre will also be hosting a university training facility in partnership with the national energy ministry and other industrial partners. In this regard, CCGV is hoping to help develop highly qualified Omani professionals.

Geoscientists without borders

The April issue of SEG's The Leading Edge features stories of the geoscience community solving global humanitarian problems. The International Symposium on the Application of Geophysics to Engineering and Environmental Problems (SAGEEP) has been formed to tackle everything from natural hazards and environmental awarness issues, to finding scarce freshwater resources in impoverished regions. Read more about how geoscientists are making a positive impact and empowering people through education and technology. Great to see this kind of out-reach.

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 scales of geoscience

Helicopter at Mount St Helens in 2007. Image: USGS.Geoscientists' brains are necessarily helicoptery. They can quickly climb and descend, hover or fly. This ability to zoom in and out, changing scale and range, develops with experience. Thinking and talking about scales, especially those outside your usual realm of thought, are good ways to develop your aptitude and intuition. Intuition especially is bound to the realms of your experience: millimetres to kilometres, seconds to decades. 

Being helicoptery is important because processes can manifest themselves in different ways at different scales. Currents, for example, can result in sorting and rounding of grains, but you can often only see this with a hand-lens (unless the grains are automobiles). The same environment might produce ripples at the centimetre scale, dunes at the decametre scale, channels at the kilometre scale, and an entire fluvial basin at another couple of orders of magnitude beyond that. In moments of true clarity, a geologist might think across 10 or 15 orders of magnitude in one thought, perhaps even more.

A couple of years ago, the brilliant web comic artist xkcd drew a couple of beautiful infographics depicting scale. Entitled height and depth (left), they showed the entire universe in a logarithmic scale space. More recently, a couple of amazing visualizations have offered different visions of the same theme: the wonderful Scale of the Universe, which looks at spatial scale, and the utterly magic ChronoZoom, which does a similar thing with geologic time. Wonderful.

These creations inspired me to try to map geological disciplines onto scale space. You can see how I did below. I do like the idea but I am not very keen on my execution. I think I will add a time dimension and have another go, but I thought I'd share it at this stage. I might even try drawing the next one freehand, but I ain't no Randall Munroe.

I'd be very happy to receive any feedback about improving this, or please post your own attempts!

Update on 2011-04-13 03:12 by Matt Hall

I have just finished a new version of this graphic, incorporating some comments from readers. I replaced the one in the original post, so please grab it from there if you want to see what I did. 

If you like this post, you might also like the more recent one on the scales of relative sea-level change, and also this older one on the scales of various experiments in oil & gas geoscience. 

News of the week

Paradigm showcases new geophysical software

Paradigm will preview its latest exploration and development software technologies and workflows at the AAPG convention 9–13 April 2011. Their agenda covers workflows for multi-disciplinary subsurface teams, next generation geologic software, and a Windows 7 interpretation platform. Paradigm is one of the sponsors of the 2011 AAPG Imperial Barrel Award student propsect competition. Follow them on Twitter: @ParadigmLtd.

Ikon Science releases RockDoc 5.5

Ikon Science has teamed up with the experts at Statoil and immersed rock physics modeling templates into the software interface, allowing users do rock physics all in one place. And with a new extension, External Interface, users can add their own C and MATLAB code to RockDoc. As a MATLAB users, we find this is a very appealing step. Click here to read more.

Third beta release for OpendTect 4.2.0

dGB Earth Sciences, creators of OpendTect, the purveyors of the Open Seismic Repository, have announced their third Beta release of OpendTect 4.2.0. The roll-out of the official version 4.2.0 is due in mid-April. If you aren't using OpendTect, why not download it, and start using this software today. And while you're at it, grab some data from the Open Seismic Repository. 

PetroChina drills first horizontal shale gas well

China sprang into the embryonic stages of shale gas exploration and development this week when PetroChina completed the drilling of its first horizontal shale gas well in Sichuan Province. It will be exciting to watch the results China strives to access its massive shale gas resources, which up until now have been beyond its technological reach. Click here to read more.

University of Aberdeen opens seisLAB

Thanks to industry sponsors BP, Chevron, BG Group, Halliburton, and Schlumberger, the University of Aberdeen will soon be decked-out with state-of-the-art geoscience software and infrastructure. seisLAB will accelerate training, research, and teaching in one of Europe's energy capitals, pushing innovation and collaboration in the field. Click here to read more.