Articles
The road less traveled – an eclectic career path in geophysics
John Peirce
So how does a kid from Cape Cod end up spending his career in the oil patch in Calgary? I spent summers in high school canoeing on long trips in the North Woods of Maine and decided that forestry would be a good career that would allow me to be…
Personal memories of the first seismic survey for oil exploration in the Canadian Arctic Islands
Pierre Marechal
Sometime during the rainy season of 1963, we had a visit by the Chief Geologist from the Paris head office. One evening, as we were sipping some cool Scotch and Soda drinks, he mentioned that Petropar, one of the subsidiaries of the group, had acquired some exploration permits in the…
20th Annual CSPG-CSEG 10km5km Roadrace and Fun Run
Recorder Committee
Once again, the CSPG-CSEG will be running its annual Roadrace and Fun Run in September. With some new and exciting changes, the event promises to be better than ever!
... Canada Celebrates the International Year of Planet Earth
Godfrey Nowlan
The International Year of Planet Earth (IYPE, www.yearofplanetearth.org) 2007-2009 provides an unprecedented opportunity for citizens of the Earth to learn more about how our planet functions and to celebrate the contributions made by earth sciences to our society. About 70 nations are ready to celebrate the year under the tag…
Centres for Research in Youth, Science Teaching and Learning – the NSERC CRYSTAL Pilot Program
Eileen Van der Flier-Keller
The NSERC CRYSTAL program is a five year (2005-2010), university based, pilot program to conduct research on the teaching and learning of science and mathematics (K-12), and to increase our understanding of the best ways to enrich the preparation of young Canadians in these foundation subjects. Increased understanding of the…
The State of Earth Science Outreach in Canada and an Action Plan for the Future: Results of a Session and Workshop Held in Yellowknife, N.W.T., May 24-27, 2007
Godfrey S. Nowlan and Donna Schreiner
The largest session in the technical program at the Annual Meeting of the Geological Association of Canada and the Mineralogical Association of Canada in Yellowknife in May 2007 was a session on earth science outreach entitled: Geoscience Skills for Canadian Communities. A total of twenty-six presentations were made at this…
EdGEO Earth Science Teacher Workshop Program
Eileen Van der Flier-Keller
EdGEO, is a national program which supports local workshops on Earth science for Canadian teachers. Grants of up to $3000 are provided per workshop. EdGEO is coordinated by the Canadian Geoscience Education Network (CGEN) of the Canadian Federation of Earth Sciences (CFES) and is funded primarily by the CSPG (Canadian…
A Quick Look in the Mirror – Results of the 2007 Membership Survey
Doug Bogstie, François Aubin and Jim Racette
Along with the 2008 Membership renewal the CSEG Executive sent out a short membership survey in December. We needed to update the demographics and activities of our society. In total we received about 650 replies which equates to about a 33% participation rate. While most respondents answered all the questions…
Azimuthal Processing for Fracture Prediction and Image Improvement
Galen Treadgold, Charles Sicking, Victoria Sublette, and Gary Hoover
Oil and gas production from tight, fractured reservoirs (sandstones, carbonates, shales) has increased considerably as commodity prices have risen over the past 5 years. A common aspect of these hard rock targets is an oriented stress field and open fractures. P-wave seismic processing that can identify these variations in the…
Careers in Earth Sciences Website
Jenn Sabean, John Clague, and Fran Heidl
In response to the increase in students dropping out of key math and science courses and to pressures faced by today’s students to make important career decisions earlier in their schooling, the Canadian Geoscience Education Network (CGEN)/Réseau Canadien d’éducation géoscientifique (RCEG) has undertaken an initiative to develop a website to…
Keep an eye on your basement! – the 3D version
John Peirce, Dave Caulfield, Bob Charters, Dumitru Ion, Hassan Hassan, and Randy Kolesar
Twenty some years ago Bernard Coulott of Imperial Oil exhorted us to “Keep an eye on your basement!” during a CSEG luncheon talk. In 2004, we presented several wide ranging geological examples of the influence of basement structure on the overlying stratigraphy (Peirce and Griffith, 2004) and emphasized how far…
Multifocusing: A New Method of Multifold Seismic Data Processing
Igor Belfer, Alex Berkovitch, and Kairat Sydykov
Much geophysical research focuses on improving the quality of time imaging by aligning the reflectors based on CMP seismic gathers. Various formulas for moveout correction that consider real data complexity and accordingly, the non-hyperbolic character of a traveltime curve, have been proposed. Researchers attempt to avoid nonlinear stretch on short…
Frequency Enhancement of Seismic Data – a comparative study
Santan Kumar, Kiran Kumari, and Ajoy Biswal
Seismic waves propagating in the subsurface are attenuated. This loss is frequency dependent i.e. higher frequencies are absorbed more rapidly than lower frequencies resulting in a narrow frequency spectrum. Since the seismic trace is a superposition of many overlapping reflections it is often difficult to identify the exact reflection boundaries.…
Integrated approach to identify complex reservoir sand channel/bar system
Ram Kumar Thakur and Frederic Duval
The oil bearing lenticular multilayered reservoir sands in the South Umm Gudair Field is embedded in the thick Ratawi Shale Member. They are sedimented as thin tidal bars anastomosed with distributary and tidal channels deposited under pro-deltaic to delta front environment.
... Fizz and gas reservoir differentiation based on stochastic inversion
Xin-gang Chi and De-hua Han
AVO attributes of gradient and intercept are related to the reservoir properties based on rock physics knowledge. We develop a new rock physics model based inversion method in this study where we apply the Xu-White shaly-sand mixture model and simultaneously invert the reservoir properties of clay content, water saturation, and…
General Mathematical Software Tools in Geophysics
Edgardo S. Cheb-Terrab, Jim Cooper and Bary W. Wilson
Over time, Geophysics, like most disciplines and industries have developed a veritable arsenal of powerful software tools to defeat complex modeling and analytical challenges. Whether the task is contouring, groundwater modeling, or GIS, highly capable software exists to help today’s problems. But what about the problems of tomorrow?
... As the science world goes mobile, expect computer technology to follow
Marc Diana
It would be ideal to have a 5,000-square-foot laboratory less than a mile away from you at all times. However, when you’re conducting research in some of the most remote locations on the planet, the amenities of a high-tech lab are an afterthought. Instead, scientists and researchers try and make-do…
What Else Can the Seismic Waveform Tell Us?
Gerhard Pratt
Traditional seismic imaging as widely practiced in the oil and gas industry, conceptually treats the seismic velocity model as if it were a separate entity from the seismic reflectivity image. A whole industry has been constructed around this separation, and for good cause: the velocity model is a very smooth,…
Seismically Guided Fracture Characterization
Robert Godfrey and Ran Bachrach
In the future, there will be greater dependency on producing oil and gas from fractured reservoirs. Characterization and forecasting in fractured reservoirs are two of the most challenging topics in the oil and gas industry. Managing such reservoirs requires construction of representative reservoir models that can handle both fracture and…
Fracture Detection Using 3D Seismic Azimuthal AVO
David Gray
Azimuthal Amplitude Versus Offset is a new seismic method that is gaining popularity amongst those investigating fractured reservoirs. It is also known as AVAZ for Amplitude Versus Angle and aZimuth, AVOA for Amplitude Versus Offset and Azimuth and AzAVO. This paper will use the term AVAZ.
...
