Science Break: Immaculate Conception, Christmas, Etc.

…Given the Christmas season was upon us as I wrote this, it seemed appropriate to ponder the many unique ways that species reproduce. It reminds me of a story I heard about my grandmother (don’t worry, as far as I know her sexual habits were entirely normal). She was a…

Tracing the Industry

…ON THE MOVE... Chris Szelewski is pleased to announce that he has joined Caracal Energy Inc as a Senior Geophysicist in the Doba asset management group. He can be reached at cszelewski@caracalenergy.com or 403-742-7201. GeoStrata Resources Inc., a full service conventional and borehole seismic acquisition company based in Calgary, AB…

Grapevine

…LUNCH & LEARN – Seismic Acquisition – 22/01/14 The upcoming Lunch & Learn (presented by Doug Pruden of Geo-Reservoir Solutions Ltd. and Jason Schweigert of BJV 3D Design) is an introduction to how seismic acquisition parameters should be tailored to the geological objectives. The presentation will walk through a case…

Brian Russell

An Interview with Brian Russell

…Doing mathematics is like exercising. Do a little bit every day and you stay in shape, either intellectually (in the case of math) or physically (in the case of exercising). Neglect it and your muscles (intellectual or physical) fade away. Geophysics is a hard science. By that I mean that…

David Gray (2013)

An Interview with David Gray

…We should process 3D seismic using 3D concepts. This means accounting for and using azimuthal variations in the seismic response (e.g. Gray et al. 2009). Recent results from azimuthal AVO analysis (e.g. Gray and Todorovic-Marinic 2004) and shearwave birefringence (Bale 2009) have shown that there is significant variation in azimuthal…

José M. Carcione

An Interview with José M. Carcione

…The science of geophysics studies the physics of our planet, considering the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, and the core, mantle, and crust of the earth. It is highly interdisciplinary since it involves geology, astronomy, meteorology, physics, engineering, and scientific computing. Today, it is impossible for a single researcher to deal with…

President’s Message

…Greetings. It is December, which means freeze-up is imminent. Seismic in Canada is historically seasonal, and in addition to the PC Season’s Greetings and my preferred Merry Christmas, I’d like to wish you all a prosperous and safe winter seismic season. December also brings CSEG elections. I am pleased that…

Executive Message

…As my term as Director of Communications comes to a close, it seems like a good time to reflect on the changes that have happened to the portfolio over the last two years. When I started as Assistant Director of Communications the process of rebranding had already begun. With a…

CAGC Column

…As far as we know, all organisms are built from the same six essential elemental ingredients: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur (CHNOPS). Almost all energy comes from the sun with perhaps the only exception being nuclear energy. Heavy elements like uranium got their stored energy from ancient supernovae…

Value of Integrated Geophysics

…Many Correlation Coefficients, Null Hypotheses, and High Value The language of the modern interpreter has a diverse vocabulary. Our action words take the form of recommendations and advice. The geophysicists’ theme, or message, must be one of value. That message is best carried fundamentally by sound principles in physics and…

Science Break: Circadian Rhythms

…Most of us go through life merrily unaware of nature’s clock that is controlling our primary life functions… until we go on vacation and jet lag strikes. There is nothing quite like that feeling of becoming completely, totally, overwhelmed by sleep in the middle of the day. It’s as if…

Tracing the Industry

…ON THE MOVE... Earth Signal Processing Ltd., Is pleased to announce that Wanda Peters is now one of our Senior Technicians. Wanda brings with her over 35 years of valuable experience and we are very pleased and fortunate to have her join our outstanding team. Wanda can be reached at…

Grapevine

…LUNCH & LEARN – Seismic Acquisition – 22/01/14 The upcoming Lunch & Learn (presented by Doug Pruden of Geo-Reservoir Solutions Ltd. and Jason Schweigert of BJV 3D Design) is an introduction to how seismic acquisition parameters should be tailored to the geological objectives. The presentation will walk through a case…

Breaking Structure: Why Randomized Sampling Matters

Felix J. Herrmann

…During this talk, Felix Herrmann will explain how ideas from compressive sensing and big data can be used to reduce costs of seismic data acquisition and wave-equation based inversion. The key idea is to explore structure within the data by deliberately breaking this structure with randomized sampling, e.g., by randomizing…

Introduction to December’s Focus: Seismic Processing

Richard Bale

…It is sometimes easy to forget, amidst the panoply of recent trends now enlivening geophysics – fractures, microseismic, reservoir monitoring, etc. – that much of our work relies on one main idea: extracting signal from data. In this issue, we revisit this basic principle and explore the implications in different…

Sparsity and band-limitation: Two sides of the same coin?

Mostafa Naghizadeh and Mauricio D. Sacchi

…We introduce a strategy to identify the optimal sampling functions for Fourier reconstruction (5D interpolation) methods. We integrate the concepts of band-limitation and sparsity into a single decision criterion to select the sampling functions with the least amount of spectral interference in the Fourier domain. The analysis was carried out…

All roads lead to Rome: predictability, sparsity, rank and pre-stack seismic data reconstruction

Aaron Stanton and Mauricio D. Sacchi

…In recent years researchers at universities, processing and oil companies have proposed several pre-stack seismic data reconstruction algorithms. In essence, all these algorithms are developed under a common assumption: there is sufficient simplicity in the observed seismic wavefield to permit its representation in terms of a finite number of basis…

A new, simple approach to surface-consistent scaling

Peter Cary and Nirupama Nagarajappa

…Surface-consistent scaling has been a standard step in the processing of land seismic data for many years, especially in the preparation of pre-stack data for AVO analysis and inversion. Despite the fact that this type of process is in such common use, we believe that there is a basic problem…

2014/2015 Executive Election

Recorder Committee

…Flo Reynolds Candidate For Vice President Growing up in a doodle bugging family, the stories of seismic jobs on the north slope of Alaska, the foothills in the Blairmore area, and around Drayton Valley for the Pembina development were shared at our dinner table. Visiting the seismic crew that my…

Asteroseismology: Stealing the geoseismologists’ rule book and launching it into space

Jaymie Matthews

…Astronomers have been trying to update the biography of the Sun for decades, at the same time trying to confirm our models for its internal structure. Like the Earth – of which we can sample directly less than 0.2% of its total depth – most of the interior of the…