Ego and Humility in Geology
It was exactly twenty years ago when I had my first geology trip to the Book Cliffs. Since then, I have led multiple field trips from analog-specific to the “standard sequenc
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Safety on Geology Field Trips
It’s lunch-time on McKittrick Trail in the Guadalupe Mountains of Texas. It’s a carbonate field trip and you and your co-worker are glad to be out of the office. You lean over
Your Training – Your Responsibility
I remember the good ole days. An intern at Exxon’s research labs at one of Houston’s fanciest restaurants “today’s special is rabbit-stuffed cabbage in a peanut sauce with
How To Describe and Interpret Carbonate Thin-Sections
Recently a friend of mine (a graduate student at Miami’s Carbonate Research Laboratory) asked for my workflow for the description and interpretation of carbonate thin-sections. I
What do Sequence Orders, Global Sea-Level Curves, Wheeler Diagrams, and VCRs have in common?
It’s the holiday season. A lot of us will receive fancy tool-boxes as gifts. Unless you’re a carpenter or a handyman, how many of these will you actually use? This post like mo
Common Mistakes in Seismic Stratigraphic Analyses (and how to avoid them)
This post focuses on mistakes I see over and over again; regardless of how big or small the company, or the experience level of the interpreter. What I am sharing are real stories,
How to describe and interpret clastic core
After writing “Describing and Interpreting Carbonate Core” I received several requests for a similar post for clastic reservoirs. Before I begin I should clarify that this art
How to Describe and Interpret Shale Core
I used the term “shale” to get your attention. Now that I have it, a more accurate title for this post should have been “how to describe and interpret mudrock cor
Describing and Interpreting Carbonate Core
So you spent the past fifteen years describing siliciclastic core and now your company has decided to drill their first carbonate well. You are excited at the thought of finally l
A plea to all seismic interpreters
Not long ago we posted a picture of a point-bar alongside a road where one could use the scale of the guard-rail to estimate sand-body thickness (~3m/10 ft). The only person to com
Top 10 Field Trip Destinations
Having been to some truly spectacular field destinations I figured it was time to create a sort of post similar to “top 10 tourist destinations, top 10 historic landmarks” etc.
Sequence Stratigraphy of Unconventional Resource Plays
In the past decade a great deal of high-quality research on the sequence stratigraphy of unconventional resource plays has been conducted by teams at Exxon Mobil (Bohacks, Lazar, O
Why go on geology field trips?
As a geological consultant I have been asked this question several times in the past, and mainly by management who are engineers. The answer is long and complicated but can be summ
