Frontier deepwater exploration in the Gulf of Mexico is becoming more difficult as we enter deeper water, much deeper reservoirs and potential under salt. As a result, we are faced with prospects that are supported by little to no amplitude, tiny seismic bandwidth as well as flat amplitude variation with offset (AVO) that sit in high pressure and high temperature environments. Every industry class, talk, symposium and workshop I have attended in the past year present software, workflows and case studies that address happy direct hydrocarbon indicators (Class IIp and III AVO) and merry time-lapse amplitude analysis (4D) in the Gulf of Mexico shelf or the North Sea, West Africa and Northern Australia deepwater where these anomalies are abundant and detectable.

Yesterday, I asked an industry expert on 4D about its application in hard sands, deep sands with flat or Class IV AVO, reservoirs with low to no acoustic impedance contrast and subsalt and FINALLY we started to talk as a group about time shifts and seismic data of low peak frequency. This is where seismic acquisition and processing technology is headed with finer acquisition and processing grid spacing, spectral decomposition and (somewhat) full waveform inversion, but not at the interpretation workflow level because these now address the planning of offset gas wells on land (Poisson’s ratio cubes, Class III, Poisson’s ratio cubes, elastic impedance, ZZZzzzzz).

Some day soon, when the romance with quick-and-easy onshore gas is over, we will re-enter the ultra-deepwater in earnest to pick apart the tiniest of changes in frequency, acoustic impedance and [insert new property here]. Three questions: 1) Who is already doing this and well? 2) Is it worth it, given the cheap cost of computing (plus) and ultimate project economics (minus)? and 3) Are we ready?

This Mother’s Day weekend, we attended our first Art Car Parade since moving to Houston. It is a once-a-year welcome addition of color, music and a carnival-like atmosphere to the otherwise sterile streets of this city. Tame as the parade was parade watchers’ reaction to a pretty funky spectacle was compared with the level of participation we’re used to in New Orleans, we didn’t get shot at. And there in a nutshell is the result of moving away from the Big Easy: you miss the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. One may argue this is a way to survive, but not to live.

Fellow New Orleans blogger Deborah Cotton was one of the 19 victims of yesterday’s second-line shooting. Thankfully, Deb made it through surgery and is in stable condition, but it’s so messed up that she just lived what she knows intimately and raises awareness about: the beauty of the second line culture and the gun violence that occurs during these cultural events, not because of them. Here is a video of Deb talking about how cultural functions held outside are not a cause but an opportunity for young black New Orleanians to settle scores and what the real problem is:

We’ve discussed how pathetic it is that the only reason this particular New Orleans shooting made national headlines is it occurred on Mother’s Day and lent itself easily to headlines. Convenient to call something the Valentine’s Day Massacre, the Christmas Killings, the Boston Marathon Bombings or the Mother’s Day shootings. What if this shooting had happened next weekend? It pains me each time I hear of violence anywhere, but to be completely honest, this particular incident depresses me more because my friends were there and one lies in a hospital bed having dodged an actual bullet and because, as Brentin Mock asks, what kind of animal does this?

… Maybe, the kids of New Orleans are who the media say they are, these “resilient” super humans who’ve encountered so much death — from Katrina to the “murder capital” stats to all the bodies caught in Lil’ Wayne songs — that getting shot or shot at is nothing to them. So dey in good condition. It’s nothing.

I don’t believe that. All I know is that it must take an animal to open fire on a gathering of men, women and children singing and dancing in the streets, celebrating mothers. Who does dat? What does dat?

… I’m already enraged. My rage grows every time I see a picture of those shot laying near pools of blood circulated on Twitter or Facebook or Vine. The images no longer report violence; they merely illustrate and animate it. They damn near auto-tune it, and “followers” automatically tune into it.

What are the City of New Orleans and the New Orleans Police Department doing to protect my friends who are part of the parade and second line from being shot instead of charging exorbitant permit prices of the social aid and pleasure clubs? What are these cultural organizations paying for? To protect the public from themselves?

Going back to the reason for the shootings: No one in the entire course of their upbringing cared or cares about these shooters. The shooters don’t care about anyone else, as is obvious by yesterday’s events, and are creating another generation of young people like them. The spiral continues downwards. Where to break it and how?

Meanwhile, the Governor of Louisiana has completely gutted mental health funding and endorses the teaching of creationism in taxpayer-funded schools, all while chiding those who want to put even the slightest brake on the crazy availability of guns, especially illegal ones, in this country. But we’re good at prayer vigils and task forces, so there’s that.

And before you idiotically write it off as a New Orleans or Louisiana thing, there are armed robberies occurring in homes and driveways all over “nice neighborhoods” in Houston for the same reasons. And the police department here reacts to these events just like its New Orleans counterpart: It reacts.

Disappointment and rage rule right now, but I know this: The way things are will not fix the wrong. This combination of police, government, media and underlying social problems that I mentioned above only serve our current social tenets of bureaucracy, sensationalism and desensitization and they will only make things worse. Change will require giving a damn and a rebuild of values, priorities and those in charge. Are you ready for that? I thought not.

For right now, please join me in wishing Deb a speedy and relatively painless recovery. In lieu of flowers, please check The Gambit for details on a planned fundraiser.

One of the tools in the geophysical workflow is the well-to-seismic tie. This is a calibration step involving the generation of a “synthetic seismic” from well data and comparing it to actual seismic data collected over the area. It ensures robustness or goodness of fit, i.e. that interfaces and intervals interpreted on the seismic data set match those same markers and units in the well penetration with a high level of accuracy. Think about it this way: If your seismic data doesn’t match what you see in the earth, what’s the point of working with it to draw conclusions about top, base, thickness and extent of the oil/gas reservoir?

So, I made a well-to-seismic tie. A Seismic Tie. Get it, get it? The reservoir section towards the base of the tie is based on Figure 11 from Roy White’s and Rob Simm’s seminal 2003 paper Good practice in well ties.

It took one black tie, one silver Sharpie, three different gauges of gold Sharpies and markers, and five hours of freehand drawing (including one hour spent pondering some geophysical concepts that came up as I drew the seismic traces surrounding the synthetic).

Everyone I’ve shown the tie to so far thinks I should get a booth at the SEG conference and make these to order. How about Geophysical Sartorialist as a title on my new business cards?

Incidentally, no new books have been posted to the sidebar as I am re-reading William Gibson’s Neuromancer after almost two decades. The first time around, I was fresh out of high school and well-traveled for my age, so the book spoke to the cosmopolitan idealist in me but was pretty opaque in terms of references simply owing to the fact that I, for lack of a better phrase, hadn’t done the time. The weariness, grit, human psychology and inhuman behavior are a lot more palpable now. Case – interesting character, considering his own relative youth. Funny thing is I read a good chunk of the book while stuck in the Atlanta airport due to an airline snafu, which led me to wonder if Gibson would have written Neuromancer differently had he seen the “future” that are ‘Lanta and the Sprawl in 2013.

While on vacation in the Virgin Islands, our little group took the opportunity to spend a day on Anegada. This little isle is a part of the UK, the northeasternmost of all of the Virgin Islands and “unique in that it is composed exclusively of carbonate rock … and that its relief is only 25 feet compared to the 1100 to 1700 foot relief exhibited by the other [volcanic] islands.” (from Reconnaissance geology of Anegada Island)

Getting to Anegada from St. John requires purchasing a ticket for an approximately 2-hour ferry ride with a stop in the West End of Tortola to clear British customs. You’d think getting on the ferry is a simple thing seeing as how it happens every month and our tickets were purchased in advance, but alas. Observe:

• Lady 1 took our confirmation slips, carefully ripped off and handed us each two paper tickets for the ferry ride to Anegada and back. She then sent us over to Lady 2 located at a very cramped station behind us in line, which required displacing passengers standing there asking Lady 2 what to do,
• Lady 2 swiped our passports, manually entered the ticket numbers next to our names on an Excel spreadsheet, attached the tickets to the back of our passports with scotch tape and sent us back to Lady 1, and
• Lady 1 took our passports again, slowly checked our names against the passenger manifest and then handed us a British customs form to fill out.

FACEPALM. The whole process took twenty minutes when it could have taken five, and minus at least three subroutines. If you don’t know me, inefficiency bothers me, especially the kind that is contrived, poorly-thought-out and has to do with paper or unnecessary paperwork. If you really don’t know me, my irritation first shows up as super-arched eyebrows, but this time I simply turned to my friend Mo and said, “You know, I could stay behind here on St. John and get a job as a process efficiency consultant.” To which Mo giggled and replied, “They’ll fire you for firing them.” Sigh.

We often joke that this is a soon-come-mon attitude typical of the Caribbean, Third World, local DMV, jury duty or any given government agency, but don’t laugh too hard because it is happening at your workplace, too, and costs time, money and sweet sweet sanity.

The oil industry is portrayed as high-tech and it is in many contexts. We have literally achieved deepwater drilling depths unimaginable only a few years ago, while the computing and software required to quickly analyze terabytes of earth and engineering data become cheaper and more commonplace. The new, crazy depositional environments, the borehole tools, the pressures, the temperatures, the chemicals, the economics, the everything. It is truly mind-bending.

But, being brilliant scientists and engineers who work with giant volumes of data and decisions on supercomputers to accurately place wellbores 5 miles below the surface of the earth and capture deep hydrocarbons alone doesn’t make us high-tech. Process efficiency does. By this, I mean the underlying framework as well as the technological and human support required to work well everyday, get work done in a timely fashion, clearly and easily communicate thoughts and results to colleagues and clients, store material for archival and future access and navigate myriad corporate administrative tasks with minimal waste of time and energy. In other words, it’s not what you do, but the way that you do it that ultimately constitutes success (and zen cool).

Sadly, many of us, i.e. technical professionals who work the earth’s subsurface and our management, are good at what we do but not at much else beyond that, so don’t know what (level of) infrastructure and support to ask for and how. Most of us work with the tools we are given, assume what now have is all that is possible and plod along from there. Such a situation can be avoided by even a basic value for and proficiency at other fields – information technology, electronics, project management, effective communication methods, logistics and organization – and seamlessly integrating them into the way we work everyday. This is where most energy companies fall down, all while better-integrated competition and other truly high-tech industries make great strides. I place this squarely at our own feet. If we the “technologists” know what better tools and processes we require, we will be equipped to actively work at and ensure the right kind and quality of support is available to us. A passive, off-the-shelf, it-will-be-fixed-some-day approach, along with the attitude that computing and other support functions are separate from or not as important as the daily technical workflow, will result in being forced to take what is offered and to like it.

Inefficiency drains in so many ways, and it is directly because of under-prioritizing or writing off what are essential requirements. As a university professor who used to work in the oil industry tells his students, “Be awesome at EVERYTHING … you won’t survive in a niche like the ol’ days.” Learn what will make you more efficient and demand the tools and quality of service that get you there.

Places I’ve been in the last two weeks, that is.

D and I were on the US and British Virgin Islands for 8 days. I highly recommend the island of St. John, with day trips to the other islands including Jost van Dyke, Anegada and Tortola, over St. Thomas.

Vacation is supposed to look like this

this

and this:

There were rocks, of the volcanic and carbonate variety, of course.

Here is the full Flickr gallery. Look at it long enough and you will get no work done, which is the point. I want to go back.

Nitin Sawhney tweets, “My dad – One of that generation who came to England with a few pence and a heart full of humility… took all the racist crap for our future.”

These words fill me with love, sadness and anger, directed mainly at Sawhney’s father and mine. Why did these sweet, humble men put their prerogatives and desires aside for the sake of family? What was and is so much greater about others than themselves? Immigrant parents amaze and infuriate me in their innate ability to stifle all that is Them to do for Theirs.

A few years back, Dad said to my brother and me, “I insisted on your education and success so that you may never have to depend on one another.”

Emigration and diaspora mean more than personal survival, but survival of the race. The impetus has to be more than duty or, why would my parents leave beloved yet going-nowhere India for the west and take all kinds of crap, racist and otherwise, to support their families and us? It cannot be because their lives didn’t matter and they were but sacrificial stepping stones on the way to us as the end. They ensured that many of their kind wouldn’t get left behind in the future, that we would survive and thrive in the new world order. Our emigrant parents were visionaries and matter so much more in the large scheme of things, if they were to choose to think about it that way.

Of course, many who left didn’t expect permanent new lives abroad and never returning to the motherland. They weren’t seers at all, but kids like my brother and me. How could they know Opportunity would become Home?

It’s more than because I am not one yet, but people like my parents perplex me. And I am betting this privilege I enjoy is what they wanted.

If you use Google’s feedreader known as Reader or pay any attention to the internet, you may have heard that Google Reader will no longer exist at mid-year. These are some of my comments on its retirement.

1. Read my friend Bob Plankers’s post in its entirety: What Content Creators and Consumers Should Do Now That Google Reader Is Dead. It’s very well-written and thorough.

Now is not a good time to evaluate a new cloud-based news reading product because they’re all performing sub-optimally. [If you want to prepare, do] milk the free trials. It’ll also be telling who makes changes and who doesn’t. The clients that don’t change probably should be looked at as being abandoned by their developers.

… You might use this opportunity to export all your data [via Google Takeout] so you have it backed up on your own terms.

… if you’re using any of the Google products for your blog, like Blogger or Blogspot, you should be looking at your options and setting yourself up to move in the future. If you aren’t using your own domain that should be high on your to-do list, because it means you have more control over what happens to your readers. Use DNS to always present your readers a host name that you control, even if it means paying for a higher tier of service in a blogging platform.

2. My answer to “a free service is a crappy service” is “a crappy service is crappy data.” In other words, “if you’re not paying for a service, you’re not the customer, you’re the product, the real customers are advertisers” is a weak excuse to make a subpar offering. If I were Google or Facebook and wanted to collect accurate information on my users for my real customers, I’d make an even better free product. It keeps the sheep mindless free-loading users happy and coming back for more, and collects real, more valuable data. For example, a share from Reader to Google+ or Twitter usually includes my explanatory note and comments from my friends; this is more nuanced feedback on customer habits and better input to models. Again, a Dislike button on Facebook would be more telling. Who you’re friends with on Facebook vs. Twitter vs. Google+ is a veritable goldmine of data right there. I could go on. As it stands, the data I have provided to Google and social media outlets have fallen on deaf ears in Ad-Model-Crunching Land because none of this advertising speaks to me, it’s annoying and I haven’t made a single purchase through sidebar ads or suggested posts.

Wait a whole second, are you suggesting that I pay for a better service so that the service provider can get better information on and more targeted ads to me? That’s rich.

3. Aldo Cortesi says, “Reader was undeniably a good product … Google destroyed the RSS feed reader ecosystem with a subsidized product, stifling its competitors and killing innovation.” Why would a subsidized product stop a competitor from innovating? Surely, other better feedreaders could have taken over even in the face of Google’s market share and because of its neglect of Reader. I asked this of Cortesi, along with more information about Google’s competitor stifling, but I guess it’s fashionable not to respond to Twit-plebes or not to have a comments’ section on your blog these days.

4. A good indicator of what Google wants to keep and grow is the bar at the top: Google+, Search, Maps, Play, Watch (YouTube), Drive. Google+ is first. Removing my main posting mechanism, i.e. Share from Reader, to Google+ will make me use it less. +1s are the equivalent of likes; they are forms of passive interaction and not active content upload. Expect Plus to go the way of Buzz, Wave, Fuzz, Zzzz, etc.

5. Note to feedreaders waiting in the wings: Build on the good points of Reader’s user interface:

• Maximum use of screen real estate with the compact view. I am not a fan of the Feedly magazine look, especially when most blogs don’t post pictures. Yay, small useless rectangular white boxes all over my screen.
• Give me the option to decide what’s important. Please don’t take random articles from various feed folders and place them at the top as FEATURED!!!1!  A list of Latest to Oldest sorted by All Feeds and Folders is great and sufficient.
• Please offer a way to subscribe to a blog without a feedreader button (tsk tsk) easily and immediately, like a bookmarklet.
• Feel free not to be the one-stop shop. It’s okay if my friends’ tweets and Facebook posts from their favorite restaurants are not interspersed with content-filled articles and posts I’d like to cache and read while waiting to get my face drilled or when on a long flight.
• As a blogger, I love starring and storing posts and notes for future reference. A simple list like Stuff I’ve Starred would be wonderful. A feed for Stuff I’ve Starred would make me hug you.

Feedly is a good-enough replacement for now, although Firefox shuns the add-on from time to time forcing me to re-install it (no, thank you, I will not switch to Chrome). Will report back with Feedly for iPod and iPad after I’ve played with it for a while. Meanwhile, if you find good desktop+tablet+smartphone feedreader options and workarounds, please let me know in the comments below.

Did you know hippos have 20-inch canines and are responsible for more human deaths in Africa annually than any other animal? That when attacked the wombat runs to its burrow and protects the entrance with its armored rear end? And the capybara is the largest South American rodent and keeps anacondas fat? Well, you would if you were playing the Mammals March Madness brackets this season. Some background from Katie Hinde, professor of human evolutionary biology at the Comparative Lactation Lab and leader of this here racket, er, I mean, bracket:

In honor of the NCAA College Basketball March Madness Championship Tournament, Mammals Suck is featuring *simulated* head to head combat competition among mammals.

… We have a crack team of R virtuosos putting together code to generate match-up outcomes with some random probability upsets and surprise Cinderellas. Battle outcome is a function of the two species’ attributes within the battle environment.  The battles are one on one meaning that only one individual represents a species against one individual from another species. Attributes considered in calculating battle outcome are temperament, weaponry, armor, body mass, fight style, and magic.

If you want to join, print out and fill in the bracket here. If you do play, Katie asks you to take a photo of yourself holding up your bracket and send it in to the blog or post it on Twitter, addressed to @Mammals_Suck with the hashtag #2013MMM. If you wish to save paper or simply keep score at home, I’ve recreated the bracket in MS Excel and you can download it here. Get in quick – Round Two is tonight!

I’m in to win it, baby! That’s my bracket above and RHINO is going all the way. There is no getting past that armor, horn, bulk, strength and momentum.

Rhino grassloads before the big fight. Flickr photo by nashih – MVP belt by me

Some notes:

1) These animals are tremendously cool.
2) Honey Badger beat Wolverine in Round 1 of Carnivores! YES! Honey Badger don’t care about Michigan.

3) River Otter beat Leopard? How is that even possible? Rematch. (And don’t say “magic.”)
4) Hanuman Langur and Anubis Baboon made it to the second round of Primates. Macaque is back to hitting the bottle.
5) Possum is making it to the Final Four. Why? Because POSSUM. All it has to do is play dead and then ninja attack when Kangaroo and Sloth aren’t looking.
6) Again, the animals here are awesome and a pleasure to learn about. When searching the nets for pictures of animals/mammals fighting, I came across some really sad images of dogs and other critters bit, scratched and beaten up in blood sport for human entertainment. Animals do fight, maim and kill one another in nature, but they do so to defend their territory, food and young, not because some peckerless humans forced them into it. Do I really want to see a gorilla and rhinoceros fight one another? No, and even if it does happen, this is how I imagine it.

As I said, Round Two is tonight. Come on, Possum, Anubis Baboon, Chimpanzee and RHINO! Now to stir up some sort of Team Rhino cheer set to appropriate music. Does anyone have this album?

Recently, several geobloggers brought up an excellent point on science communication: Now that it has been established that researchers need to do more outreach to share their work, HOW? The barriers are plenty – sharing on the internet takes energy, time, some understanding of the different online outlets, putting words together in an explanatory and not officious manner and, most critically in my opinion, the inclination to share what you know to the extent that you can – and you end up with folks walking away saying “blogging shmogging.” Whether in academia or private industry, scientists find it much easier to plow on through their work, teach their immediate co-workers and apprentices verbally, share with the powers that be via slideshows, internal white papers or external, limited-access journal articles and call it a day. Note that “documenting work in a meaningful way” and “sharing findings with a wider audience” are not listed above, as there is no apparent intellectual or monetary reward for doing so. This is why I believe a philosophy of and personal value for “maximum knowledge to and from maximum people” has to be established first. From that place, the methods of communication (online or off) become secondary and much easier to choose from based on the information that needs sharing.

There are practical reasons for information sharing as well: Making more of you and getting as many people knowledgeable in, if not excited about, what you do so that they send or vote money your way. Sharing online doesn’t just mean talking, it means a lot of listening, too. This is a great source of information, ideas and critique for your own work. Take the following interchange between Matt Kuchta, a professor of geology and myself, an industry geophysicist:

A very basic example, but one with a point: In the span of ten or so tweets, I challenged Matt’s rendering of the transition between continental and oceanic lithosphere with a suggestion, Matt challenged me back, we alluded to the lack/scarcity of outcrop, I pointed out that an alternate indicator is new, deeper seismic and Matt kept and changed portions of his interpretation. We could have done this over email, but more people benefit and can join in from holding the exchange on Twitter following which I can record the dialogue here on my blog (or on Storify) for future reference.

How much to share, how and where: Lockwood Dewitt has written a great post about why he started his blog and how he keeps it going: “Blogging takes exactly the amount of time you want it to.” I extend that to sharing takes exactly the amount of time you want it to. If you don’t want to start a blog, get going with a low-energy-for-entry outlet like Twitter and use it to write a few words on your topic and post a link to the details. From there, try very hard to respond to those who ask questions about your post and manage your interactions, which  can be intimidating but only for those who let it be.

Once here, you will hear all kinds of things about the means or media of communication: Print is extinct! Online is the way to go! The blog is dead! Long live the blog tweet tweet! No, hark! The revival of long-form writing online. Blogger or Tumblr? All hail!

Whatever. Blessed with increasing methods of communication, I don’t see a reason to find the Grand Unified Medium. Use them all. The point is to communicate and share as much as possible – through print and online, blog and tweet, FB post and Instagram picture – even if you end up being redundant. There is no such thing as too much information sharing. And here is what I mean by establishing a personal morality of learning and sharing widely, i.e. increasing the awareness of self and others as its own end, before anything else can happen.

(Something I will address later with a compare and contrast is why it’s worth investing in your own blog space if that’s where you want to head. Short answer: Blogger, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, etc. don’t belong to you and can be taken away at any time.)

What to share: I am a geoblogger, but this isn’t a geoblog. If you go through these here archives, I write about travel, New Orleans, food, science, politics, being brown, being female and brown, Wisconsin, the Green Bay Packers, family, history, injustice and assorted boondoggles. There is no rule that states that you have to blog on a certain topic inside a specific genre. That’s what blog categories and specific RSS feeds are for. Sure, there are folks who don’t follow me on Twitter because all of my tweets aren’t about geology. They have their reasons, while I have my priorities. You won’t please everyone, but if you’re in it for a popularity contest, you’ve forgotten the whole reason for being here: to learn, share what you know, broaden your outlook and hopefully meet other like-minded people.

Confidentiality and openness: Sharing is also hard to do if a lot of the work you do is competitive and/or proprietary, but there are tenets and techniques of your science or specialty that you can discuss. For instance, I cannot divulge what I work on in the office, but can and will gladly write an explanation of Seismic Inversion For The Non-Geoscientist here or anywhere else. Another ideal that information sharing helps along is Open – open data, open results, open access. Matt Hall also works for the energy industry and I agree with his assessment that it “has a lot of catching up to do. Humanity is faced with difficult, pressing problems in energy production and usage, yet our industry remains as secretive and proprietary as ever.” In a similar vein, I’ve postulated here that “the crux of the problem is that the business ends of academia, companies and software providers are at odds with their more important aspects of teaching, finding oil and creative solutions.” The more we share (what we can), the more the results happen here and are available to a wider audience.

You will notice that, ultimately, all of this leads not just to talking about science online, but doing science in a wider framework. Funny, that’s what the internet was built for in the first place.

***

As long as you want to be here and can handle it, it’s not that bad and actually pretty good. If nothing else, I’ve made good friends. Should you want to start your own blog/Twitter feed/online outlet (or just want to discuss this whole business of sharing), please leave a comment below and I will either help you or find someone who can.