Celebrating fifteen years of explaining oil and gas geoscience and technology to geoscientists, petroleum engineers and the wider public.
Christine Karlsson and Ingvild Carstens help Kirsti at the launch of GEO ExPro Magazine in 2004.
GEO ExPro Magazine is 15-years-old! A full blown teenager – though without the associated tantrums and acne, thankfully!!
When I first came across GEO ExPro, at the Petroleum Society of Great Britain PETEX conference in 2004, the magazine was just a few months old – not even a toddler. As with children – how the time flies! And what a privilege it has been to be involved with the growth and development of this particular ‘child’ and to watch it develop into the popular petroleum geoscience information resource it has become.
I admit, when first handed a magazine by a smiling young lady at the GEO ExPro booth at PETEX, I wondered whether there really was a need for another geoscience magazine – but then I looked inside and realised that nothing else was around that could give me such a broad range of information in the geosciences, written in a way I could understand across all the disciplines, and with lots of beautiful high quality colour pictures. This really was a new concept for the E&P industry. Before long, I was part of the team, writing articles, and I am proud to have been Editor in Chief since 2010.
Expanding Portfolio
The cover of the first ever GEO ExPro Magazine.
I recently dug through my library of GEO ExPro copies and looked at the first issue, published in June 2004, in time for the magazine’s launch at the EAGE annual conference. Many of the features for which GEO ExPro is well known are there: geotourism, with some lovely double spread photos of the Paris wine region; a discussion on an innovative geophysical resource, CSEM, now well-known but at the time still at the proof of concept stage; a discussion on the hydrocarbon potential of an underexplored area, West Greenland; and a profile of a well known character in the exploration industry. This shows how the creator and original Editor of GEO ExPro, Halfdan Castens had a clear visualisation of what was needed in this new magazine and skilfully brought his ideas to fruition.
Since 2004, GEO ExPro has grown and expanded and also embraced technological change. From a purely print offering, we expanded to cyberspace, introducing the innovative iPad App in 2013, which allowed readers to interact not only with articles, using hot spot maps and slide shows, but also with the advertisements; spinning models every which way and pulling sliders over seismic the reveal ‘before and after’ images. From that idea we developed our WebApp website, again with interaction and user choice at its core, but accessible to an ever-growing number of users throughout the world. Here it is also possible to download copies of the magazine and access our library of past online and print articles – nearly 1,650 of them at the last count.
And all free!
The GEO ExPro team at the EAGE Conference & Exhibition in Amsterdam in 2014.
Crowds gathering at our 10th Birthday Celebrations in 2014, at the EAGE Annual Conference & Exhibition in Amsterdam.
Crowds gathering at our 10th Birthday Celebrations in 2014, at the EAGE Annual Conference & Exhibition in Amsterdam.
Celebration Time!
Well, you can’t have a birthday and not celebrate, can you?
And celebrate we most certainly did! Our stand at the 2019 EAGE conference was festooned in turquoise and orange balloons, the staff all wore turquoise and orange (even MD Tore was forced into a turquoise tie – though maybe I overdid it with the turquoise trousers!) and we passed round many glasses of English champagne. We raffled free adverts for our loyal advertisers and spot prizes for the nearly 100 conference attendees who had come to our stand to help us celebrate, where several lucky people won copies of our book ‘An Introduction to Exploration Geophysics’, based on articles by longstanding contributors Lasse Amundsen and Martin Landrǿ. It was great to have Martin there to help pull out the prize-winner’s names – helped by the man who featured in that first profile in the first GEO ExPro, Ian Jack!
Thank you so much to everyone who came along to the stand and who made it such fun. Especial thanks to Nathan and Marcin Young-Ziolkowski who worked tirelessly all week to ensure the success of the event.
Our 15th Birthday celebrations at the EAGE Annual 2019 in London.
Our 15th Birthday celebrations at the EAGE Annual 2019 in London.
Our 15th Birthday celebrations at the EAGE Annual 2019 in London.
Our 15th Birthday celebrations at the EAGE Annual 2019 in London.
Our 15th Birthday celebrations at the EAGE Annual 2019 in London.
Our 15th Birthday celebrations at the EAGE Annual 2019 in London.
Our 15th Birthday celebrations at the EAGE Annual 2019 in London.
More Thanks!
Thank you as well to my colleagues Kirsti and Tore Karlsson for everything they do for the magazine: Kirsti recently worked out that she has spent in total over a year of her life in exhibition halls, and hasn’t even tried counting the miles she has walked around them! Thank you to the many people – I won’t try naming you, because I’m sure to leave someone out – who over the past 15 years have helped out on our stands, always presenting a smiling, encouraging face to the delegates. And thank you to the ‘backroom staff’ who are involved in creating both the print magazine and the website – we couldn’t do it without you.
I would also like to thank our advertisers, many of whom have kept loyal to us throughout the recent downturn, knowing that advertising in GEO ExPro was going to hit their target markets: we would never have made 15 years without your support.
To all our writers and contributors, some of whom (Tom, Rasoul, Lasse and Martin) have been with us for most of those 15 years, I would like to express my huge gratitude for the continuous supply for excellent, fascinating and interesting stories and the flow of wonderful photographs and illustrations, which together are the lifeblood of GEO ExPro.
And my biggest thank you goes to you – all you out there, throughout the world: our readers. Because, without you, there really wouldn’t be a GEO ExPro Magazine
Here’s to the next 15 years!
You may also like…
Some recommended GEO ExPro articles relating to the content discussed in this editorial.
GEO ExPro Turns Ten
Jane Whaley
Distributed to more than 60 countries; online readers in 183 countries – GEO ExPro has become a global magazine in just ten years.
This article appeared in June, 2014
A Must Have Book for Any Geophysicist
Anton Ziolkowski
A must have book for any geophysicist: A a brief review of the book titled “An Introduction to Exploration Geophysics with Recent Advances”.
This article appeared in Vol. 15, No. 4 – 2018
An Introduction to Exploration Geophysics with Recent Advances
Jane Whaley
Brand new book from GEO ExPro & Bivrost Geo. All you ever wanted to know in an introduction to exploration geophysics – clearly explained and beautifully illustrated.
This article appeared in April, 2018
