Articles
An efficient 3D explicit finite-difference prestack depth migration
J. Ren, C. Gerrard, J. McClean, M.Orlovich and A. Long
An explicit, constrained operator is presented here for wavefield extrapolation in 3D wave equation depth migration. The migration cost and image quality benefit from its reduced number of independent coefficients within the operator, negligible numerical anisotropy, and flexibility that allows for different propagation angles and step sizes in the inline…
Statistics Made Easy, Nineteen Times Out of Twenty
Jan Dewar
True story: An interpreter – new to AVO – upon being presented with P-reflectivity and S-reflectivity sections, said, “Two sections? I can hardly cope with just the structural stack section. How do you expect me to manage two?” Wouldn’t you have thought more information would make his job easier, not…
Fracture Detection using 3D Azimuthal AVO
David Gray and Dragana Todorovic-Marinic
The purpose of this presentation is to provide an overview of how well AVAZ (Amplitude Versus Angle and aZimuth) extractions from P-wave seismic data compare to more widely accepted measurements of fracture density and fracture strike. Such measurements come from core data, structural interpretations, and curvature, Formation Micro-Imager (FMI) logs,…
Distance Education
Krista Poscente
Distance education has a long history of providing educational opportunities for individuals who are unable or unwilling to attend traditional institutions. Our understanding of distance education is often defined by the associated mode of delivery. Correspondence is distance education delivered via the postal system. Internet course delivery has yielded new…
What Does Continuing Education Mean?
Penny Colton
The RECORDER asked me to write up some answers to the following questions: What is the role of Continuing Education in my organization (which I've taken to mean both CSEG and APEGGA). What does CE mean to me? How does one obtain CPD hours or continuing training? What is its…
The Space Environment and its impact on human activity
Panagiotis K. Marhavilas
The origins and fate of life on Earth are intimately connected to the way the Earth responds to the Sun’s variations. We live in the extended atmosphere of an active star where the solar activity and the space magnetic storms affect in various ways human life. Solar conditions are favorable…
The Calgary Mineral Exploration Group
Paul Hawkins, Henry Lyatsky
As the Alberta economy develops new industries and the required infrastructure, its need for diverse natural resources grows. Fortunately, there is much more to Alberta’s natural endowment than oil, gas and coal. We have long had, and have today, a vibrant mineral-exploration industry. Calgary has an annual mining conference, every…
Geoscience: Student-Industry Mixers and the SEG/EAGE Short Course 2004
Penny Colton
Dr. Paul Weimer of the U of Colorado presented the 2004 SEG/EAGE Distinguished Instructor Short Course (DISC), entitled Petroleum Systems of Deep-Water Settings, in Calgary on Wednesday, September 29, hosted by the CSEG - who honoured CSPG membership in determining an attendee's fee class. This course will be held at…
Oil Sands and Geophysics
Douglas Schmitt
It is well known that the production of conventional light from the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin is declining rapidly. Heavy oils, here taken in the broad sense to include both heavy oil and bitumen, are replacing much of this lost production and their combined production already exceeds that of conventional…
Exploration Challenges and Opportunities
Paul Durling and Tom Martel
Corridor Resources is a junior E&P company based in Halifax that focuses its exploration efforts in and around the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The Gulf occupies an area roughly one-half the size of Alberta and is surrounded by 5 Canadian provinces. Two sedimentary basins underlie the Gulf (Fig. 1): the…
3D ground penetrating radar surveys on a frozen river lagoon
Monica Moldoveanu-Constantinescu and Robert Stewart
This paper describes ground-penetrating radar (GPR) surveys that were conducted to characterize the ice and shallow subsurface of a frozen lagoon at Bowness Park, Calgary. We used Sensors and Software Inc.’s 250 MHz NOGGIN and Smart Cart system as well as a Pulse EKKO 4 system with 100 MHz antenna.…
The surface microseismic monitoring system on Turtle Mountain, Alberta
Robert Stewart, Henry Bland, Jeff Thurston, and Kevin Hall
Considerable attention has been directed toward seismic activity in the Crowsnest Pass area of southern Alberta on account of the calamitous Frank Slide in 1903 and numerous rockfalls on Turtle Mountain since then. The mountain is comprised of an unstable anticlinal structure (Jones, 1993; AGS, 2003) with a number of…
3C-3D seismic micro-survey at a Maya plaza ruin in Belize, Central America
Nicholas Kaprowski and Robert Stewart
Using seismic methods to image the very shallow subsurface is not yet common. The Applied Geophysics Group at the University of Calgary is involved in developing shallow seismic techniques and identifying their potential value in various disciplines, such as archaeology. To this end, we have conducted a number of seismic…
Aurora – The magnificent northern lights
Ioannis Daglis and Syun-Ichi Akasofu
The aurora is beautiful, spectacular, splendid, and appears quite frequently – almost nightly in the polar sky. Appearing in the form of majestic, colourful, irregular lights in the night sky, the aurora has a variety of shapes, colours, and structures, and continuously changes in time. Everybody who has seen the…
Making the Circle Stronger: A Geoscientist’s Perspective of the 2004 APEGGA Annual Conference Professional Development Seminars
Tom Sneddon
The following is a geoscientist’s summary of the multi-discipline professional development sessions offered at the APEGGA Annual Conference in Edmonton in April 2004.
... Proceedings of the 2004 CSEG Convention Workshops
Satinder Chopra / Helen Isaac / Jason Noble / Oliver Kuhn
Overview of the 2004 CSEG Convention Workshops
... Foamy oil and wormhole footprints in heavy oil cold production reservoirs
Sandy Chen, Larry Lines, Patrick Daley
Simultaneous extraction of oil and sand during the cold production of heavy oil generates high porosity channels termed “wormholes”. The development of wormholes causes reservoir pressure to fall below the bubble point, resulting in dissolved-gas coming out of solution to form foamy oil. Amplitude anomalies in the vicinity of the…
The Winds of Change: Anisotropic Rocks – Their Preferred Direction of Fluid Flow and Their Associated Seismic Signatures
Heloise B. Lynn
All of us interact in the context of our community. SEG and AAPG have played major positive roles in the community wherein I have worked for the last 30 years. These two societies invited me to speak upon a topic of my choice, for the benefit of our joint communities,…
A brief review of Remote Sensing
Compiled by Helen Isaac
Remote sensing is the science of acquiring, processing and interpreting data about the Earth's surface that is recorded by sensors on satellites or aircraft. Geoscience applications of remote sensing include the mapping of surficial deposits/bedrock, lithology, structures and structural trends, sedimentation and geohazards, sand and gravel exploration/ exploitation, mineral and…
