Atlantic Rifted Margin Studies from the Edge: Geophysical Research at Memorial University

J. Kim Welford, Alison E. Malcolm, Colin G. Farquharson, and Jeremy Hall

…Located in Canada’s easternmost province of Newfoundland and Labrador, researchers at Memorial University are ideally positioned to undertake geophysical research along the country’s Atlantic margins where offshore exploration is still very much at the frontier stage, spurred on by world-class discoveries and production in the Jeanne d’Arc and surrounding basins.…

Exploration Initiatives, Offshore Regions, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada

Deric E.L. Cameron, Erin Gillis, Victoria Mitchell, and Richard Wright

…Exploration initiatives over the past decade have led to renewed interest in exploration in the slope and deep-water regions of offshore Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. New multi-client regional 2D seismic surveys (2011-2018), guided initially by satellite slick mapping, have provided approximately 170,000 line kms of long offset, broadband 2D seismic…

Frontier Exploration: Considerations When Developing a Predictive Rock Physics Framework

Nick Huntbatch, Alsing Selnes, Neil Whitfield

…Exploration in frontier basins is challenging; subtle targets, large seismic datasets, sparse well penetrations, and many unknowns. There is an obvious requirement for interpretations to be robust, but also delivered on a commercial timeframe. In order to make robust and informed interpretations of seismic amplitudes, we need to understand the…

Building a Geological-Pressure Model Incorporating Global Analogues

Sam Green and Alexander Edwards

…To de-risk a frontier area properly requires establishing the geological framework, and this is where seismic data can provide important controls on the basin framework by helping to understand features such as stratigraphic thicknesses, large-scale structural features such as faults and folds, and vertical and lateral velocity variations. To help…

Repositioning Seismic Technologies and Services in a Dynamic Upstream Oil and Gas Industry

CAGC Executive

…In September of 2018 the upcoming winter season quickly went from decent to dreadful. With the widening of the Oil Differentials, potential projects were cancelled and the outlook for 2019 began to look like the bottom experienced back in 2016. The CAGC commissioned the following op-ed in order to look…

Board of Directors’ Message

…One of our main concerns as board members of the CSEG is ensuring our members find value in our society. To fulfill this, we offer a variety of events and workshops that can benefit and engage all of our members. These range from social mixers to educational courses like those…

CAGC Column: The Ripple Effect

…The CAGC luncheon held in early March each year is also the association’s (AGM) Annual General Meeting, when members gather to ratify the slate of Directors for the current year and receive an update on the association’s financial state and industry activities, past and planned. The association has managed to…

Science Break: Savage or Slave?

…Following the last ice age, in a few large river deltas (especially the Tigris-Euphrates, but also the Yangtze, Indus and others), small pockets of humans began to domesticate certain animals and crops. After a period of incubation in these isolated locations, this new lifestyle, with its advantages of a stable…

Tracing the Industry

…Corporate Grapevine Petro-Explorers Inc., a company started by Azer Mustaqeem (P. Geo) and Dr. Valentina Baranova almost 10 years ago, is pleased to share news about its continued growth. We welcome Fenglin Xia (P. Geo) as a senior geophysicist to our technical team. Fenglin has accumulated over 25 years of…

Marianne Rauch-Davies

An Interview with Marianne Rauch-Davies

…Marianne, let us begin by asking about your educational background and work experience. In 1985, I received a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the Karl Franzens University in Graz, Austria. In 1988, I immigrated with my family to Australia and started my career at Curtin University in Perth as a…

An Unconventional View of Geoscience

David Gray

…Shale oil and gas production and “fracking” are with us to stay. We geoscientists need to understand how we can contribute to the “shale revolution.” The revenue from a good shale well allows the operator to rapidly recover the costs of drilling, completing, and fracking the well because of the…

Board of Directors’ Message

…The Digital Revolution and the CSEG Advantage! While the Canadian resource industry struggles against transportation bottlenecks, declining commodity prices and uncertain social acceptance, the CSEG has likewise faced many headwinds. The CSEG has been challenged to modernize its thinking about how to support and promote its membership and the science…

Chief Editor’s Message

…70th Anniversary On April 30, 1949 the president of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG), Dr. L. L. Nettleton, met with eleven geophysicists for an "informal" lunch in Calgary to outline the advantages of creating a local section (Finch, 1985; Larson, 2005). The Calgary-based geophysicists were convinced and set about…

CAGC Column: A New Year's Resolution

…It has become a tradition as the New Year begins, to wish everyone happiness and prosperity, so in keeping with that sentiment, the CAGC extends best wishes to everyone in the CSEG family. It is also a time for New Year Resolutions, perhaps Canada should resolve to get some pipelines…

Tracing the Industry

…Socially Speaking... 2019 CSEG Doodlespiel January 18 - 20, 2019 We are pleased to announce that the event nearly full. Please remember that your registration is not complete until we have received your waiver and fees. When the main/competitive draw has been filled with teams who have completed registration, teams…

Introduction to January Focus: Research Across Canada

Katie McLean and Germán Rodríguez-Pradillar

…There´s no better way to kick off the year than with fresh ideas to expand our knowledge and improve our skills as exploration geoscientists. To help you out with that, we compiled in this special edition some exciting contributions from various researchers from all across Canada that cover some state-of-the-art…

Skeletonization and Empirical-Mode Decomposition of 2-D Potential-field Images

Le Gao and Igor B. Morozov

…The volumes of modern gridded data collected by the geophysical exploration industry are often large and can benefit from methods for image decomposition, pattern analysis, and interpretation. Automated pattern-recognition methods can be useful for both seismic and potential-field images. In both of these cases, it is important to extract quantitative…

Mechanics of Seismic Q

Igor B. Morozov

…Seismic- wave attenuation and dispersion are studied in most geophysical curricular and broadly used in both academic and applied research. Applications of these concepts include identification of gas reservoirs and chimneys from frequencydependent seismic amplitudes, analysis of frequency dependent P- and S-wave velocities, interpretation of the effects of porosity and…

CCArray and EON-ROSE: Emerging Pan-Canadian Multidisciplinary Research Initiatives

David W. Eaton, Katherine Boggs, Thomas S. James, Jason C. Droboth, Pascal Audet

…The Canadian Cordillera – the mountainous regions of western Canada – represents a world-class natural laboratory for exploring the interconnected Earth systems that are critical to our understanding of major scientific grand challenges. The Canadian Cordillera Array (CCArray) is a proposed international scientific initiative, spearheaded by the creation of a…

Impact Craters in Seismic Data

Amanda Obodovsky

…Since the acquisition of seismic data in the 1960’s, impact structures have been seen in seismic data. These are structures that were created earlier in the Earth’s history from a meteorite impact and have since been buried underground. While many of these unique structures are known to be located in…