It is fun for an amateur like me to look out over the landscape (moonscape) near a place like Robert Lee, Texas and see where the islands were in the vast sea.
I know terr-riffically boring to you continental bangers.
Joe(I like seeing where the beaches were a couple of million years ago.)Nation
"CONTINENTAL BANGERS" would be an excellent name for a breakfast sausage
So how does it work? Do you go out in the boonies with one of those seismograph trucks that vibrate like an old maid's dream of dreams? Or do you just squat over some kind of deep scan radar, burning holes in your brainstem while it burrows deep into the rock.
Joe(same atomic weight)Nation
Yes. I am, if nothing else, a curious person.
We have gone through nine pages of tangential references to data, storing, gathering of same, but nothing on how tis done.
What? So you whack a big spike with a sixteen pound sledge while someone holds their left ear to the ground. If if sounds hollow, we drill there.
That's how we found our grandma's well.
Joe(I'm listening)Nation
Thanks a lot, Joe.
I'm packing today for a long weekend with the in-laws in the Great Mesquite Forest of West Texas. Thanks for reminding me again how bleak it is.
Did I tell you that last year, as we were driving to a small town 20 miles west of WF, we spotted a whole herd of camels grazing on the mesquite?
Eva(no, it wasn't a mirage)
AHEM,
Well, so you can understand better, were looking for a specific rock unit contacted by another rock unit with specific chemical characteristics that indicate the presence of a specific mineral(Thats about all I can say)
So, in order to locate this, we employ several techniques.
1Old Fashioned mapping, by doing flyovers and walkovers from Government Geologic SUrvey maps (weve done this last year). I only was down for about 2 weeks in a QA and "red team" where I questioned all the samples and data in a big session with the field guys. We went out to about 3 sites and flew over an area about as big as all New England and New York
2 Then We locate some points accurately on the map and , using these points as land references, we fly a LiDAR survey to most accurately detect "contact zones" where one rock bed touches another.(in the altiplano of the 4 major ANdean countries these rocks are usually glacial crap, old sedimentary layers that are all crumpled and bunched up like a throw rug, and, interspersing this are fresh Tertiary to recent volcanics.
3 We take the LiDAR data, which are a bunch of DVDs (each one worth about 100K) and , using our previously mentioned maps(GPS based with a bunch more DVDs), we knit the maps together using a proprietary piece of software developed by another contractor. These give us maps of sufficient accuracy to tell us that we are probably on the right track or not. This is the key data that we call-"go/no go"
4 Were now past go so From this earlier data we defined a seismic trace-line in which we are , by using geophones equipped with radio transmitters able to send out returns from passive seismic signals. We are, in reality, using the earths own stomach grumblings to power up our geophones. This is a rather crude but initially effective data trick, especially in seismically active areas where the daily tremors are cranked out within a narrow band. We will leave the gephones(JUGS) out in the field all winter and, have technicians service them over the next 5 months and return the data to us. The data collected is a bunch of seismic digital returns and a time trace "pip" that is accurate to a tenth of a millisecond. This time pip is on a carrier that identifies which geophone is sending the signal. Its essentially a radio frequency "bar code" of each jug. This time return, by the way, is excellent accuracy especially since the rock has a transmission rate of about 12000 to 20000 ft/sec. We then produce a prelim seismic and LiDAR geological and stratigraphic mapIts a seismic tomography. I was down there this past weekend just to look at the data . We all sat around with those 3_D glasses , like we were in one of those 1950s SCiFi movies. All I hadda do was take a trip to watch some 3-D clips and eat lunch. It was like a business trip from NY to Hawaii. Next year we will do active seismic, employing "Vibrasize" trucks , which carry a big swivel plate over their heads. The trucks swivel the plate down and onto the ground and then a variable frequency sound trace is fed to the plates which couples to the earth and sends out sound down to 20hz. We will have more jugs set out in between our present array and a few more in a "RAy" array. Then we will send out sound and record the traces on the vibrasize vehicles from RF transmitters as well as wired up seismic for close in (say less than 2 miles from the truck) We will have them move at specific distance intervals (all to be computed so that we can specify contract maximums and all those boring things like expense surveys and subcontractor fees). We will subcontract all the vibrasize work because the survey companies have all the equipment and are ready to roll ,
Its pretty much us producin a series of surface maps and cross sections of the geology of the area so that, when we actually do the drilling, large amounts of money wont be wasted on each test well. (some of these wells can go up from a half to 3/4 million) and we may be drilling 20 to 50 (Not to mention the scientists and engineers and technicians).
So, our rules are, we expend preliminary survey money that only increases in minor arithmetic lots to save serious money later on where costs can mount logarithmically.
There will be some publishable science out of this and I think that some of it will be very cool.
Farmerman
Fascinating!
BBB
Hmmm, upon careful reread of my previous post, I left one with the opinion that we would be drilling scientists and engineers. This is a terrible error, caused by my lack of caring about my writing skills. I meant to convey that money spent for drilling does not include salaries for scientists , engineers, and technicians.
Glad I cleared that up.
Quote:Unfortunately Noddy, my ancestors were from the Carpathians and into Georgia and Ukraine. Weve had a sorry history full of tales of starvation and wolves and the Tsars Army shooting people over sausages and chochkies.
Obviously your family genetic structure predisposes you to pumping iron and dodging lead.
Don't know Joe Leaphorn--he's a friend of mine.
farmerman wrote:looting the dead again unk?
Actually I was looking at very early colonial churches. c. 1540-50. Very different from the later standard Spanish colonial style, and the style(s) was only part of it.
I am just getting back to this thread after a week or so. Thanks for the details on the work. ...an area the size of New England and New York...
crap. Tis a lot of looking. Not like it was in the Osage circa 1927, you found a place flat enough to park the wagons and you had your crew start threading four inch pipe ten feet long. Punch a hole anywhere through the buffalo grass and when you were down fifty joints or so, stand back.
It's sounds, and probably is, a lot more complicated than I had imagined.
The publishable science you mentioned, what else do we learn besides where to drill?
Joe(I was so glad to find out you weren't drilling scientists and engineers. I wouldn't unless they were named Bambi and Dr. Choochie)Nation
without stealing thunder from my team, we will be publishing about the roots of collision style mountains using an example from field work.
PS we aint looking for oil. When they drilled for oil in the 20's they didntt have any of the technology we have today.(obviously) What used to be a 5% chance of hitting oil is now almost reversed.
I didn't think you were looking for oil, there's not much future in it, is there?
I used the Osage because it's the closest experience I have with anything seismic. (Other than the sights, emissions and sounds of the competitors in the Paul's Valley Kielbasa Eating Contest)
So, if the question isn't too rude, is it anything like piecework? If they dig, plow, punch, drawover where your team says and they find what they were looking for, do they send you a fat bonus??
or do you just read about it in Vibrations (Not what you think: The publication of seismic activities)
Joe(I made that up)Nation
Joe, if I say anything Id be in some sort of breach. I can say that yes Im paid through an agreement.
Im not sure where wed publish, many of the bigger journals like Nature or Geology, require a full year of peering and edit. The NAture article on the
Tiktalliik
fossil was work that was about two and a half years old before the article was accepted and scheduled for print.
So they move at about the same speed as their subjects.
Joe(I have to go look up the Tiktalliik ... um, bird with,, no nevermind)Nation
