“Land Plants Didn’t Evolve Until the Silurian”
If you were to ask my wife when plants first evolved, she would answer without hesitation (in a mock pompous voice) “land plants didn’t evolve until the Silurian”! She is…
Geology & Geophysics
The Incredible World of Fossils
I fell in love with fossils like many others, as a child, hunting on the world-famous Jurassic Coast in Dorset in the UK, a UNESCO World Heritage site, and location…
Gradiometry – The new standard
The use of Airborne Gravity Gradiometry (AGG) for oil and gas exploration has expanded significantly since the year 2000, particularly in frontier areas. In some geological environments the use of…
The Artemis Project: Geology’s Gateway to the Stars
NASA had been under pressure to put a scientist on the Moon – and so in 1972, they sent geologist Harrison Schmitt. NASA’s Artemis I patch. © NASA.In December 1972,…
“Gone Fossil Hunting…”
In the first article in this series, I highlighted the staggering breadth of utility that fossils have, from academic research to applied industrial analysis, value in commercial trade and preservation…
Nature Shows Off
Most Surtseyan style eruptions involve a relatively small amount of water encountering magma. But the explosion in January this year at the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haʻapai volcanic island erupted in a…
Jurassic Deep-Sea Fishing
You could be forgiven for thinking Mary was the first to discover ichthyosaur and plesiosaur fossils, but specimens of ichthyosaur vertebrae and propodial (limb) bones and pliosaur vertebral centra were…
A clearer vision with seismic inversion
It takes a lot of people to drill a well and many different disciplines working together, like the moving parts of a complex machine. It has been said that oil…
The Artemis Project: Geology’s Gateway to the Stars
NASA’s Artemis I patch. © NASA. In December 1972, the 17th and last Apollo mission put Harrison Schmitt, the only professional geologist ever to have ventured into space, on the…
Improving seismic quality
With many of the world’s basins now explored, the search for new hydrocarbons is becoming dependent on improvements in seismic data quality. One of the new acquisition techniques is WesternGeco’s…
The Many Ways Fossils Help Decode the Subsurface
From determining how rocks correlate to reconstructing palaeoenvironments and palaeotemperatures, which is relevant to the petroleum geologist, fossils are of great significance to science and industry While there are lots…
What Drives Continents Apart?
Rather than convection currents within the mantle – could the forces at play be related to the Earth’s velocity? During a visit to Bolivia in 2001, the sight of marine…