Page 19 - 2020 GGE Newsletter

Page 19

A NOTE FROM THE ROBERT J. WEIMER CHAIR AND
DIRECTOR OF THE SEDIMENTARY ANALOGS DATABASE (SAND)
CONSORTIA
WRITTEN BY LESLI WOOD

Hello to you all!
I write to you two days before Thanksgiving from my home office, which I share
with my pig Bartley. He is not the greatest office mate as he seems to have a habit of
waking up just when I am in the middle of teaching or having a conversation with
the Vice President of Research! He makes his presence known, but it keeps the kids
awake and I am actually enjoying record attendance in all the classes that I teach on
line! Apparently, when students are able to sit on their couch, eat cereal, answer
questions, and talk to a pig, they are more willing to attend class. I get it.
COVID cut travel short for all of us in 2020, but I managed to squeak in a trip to
Dallas and Amarillo to teach the Bill Hailey Memorial Short Course for the SW
AAPG section in early January. A great group of colleagues in both cities, all en-
gaged in listening and learning about subaqueous mass failures and their role in
filling the many basins of the world. A great chance for me, as well to learn from the
operators and explorers in these basins. I traveled to Calgary, Canada in late Janu-
ary to provide a talk on paleo-seascape and –landscape evolution to the Canadian Society of Petroleum Geologists. This
talk on seismic geomorphology was given in the den of Henry Posamentier, so it had to be done right! Great crowd and
great hospitality from our colleagues north of the border. My final face-to-face visit in 2020 was a trip on March 9 down
to Roswell, New Mexico to present a talk to the Roswell Geological Society. Those guys have a small but really engaged
group of geoscientists. I talked about our ongoing work in the San Juan Basin looking at the section from the El Vado
down through the Gallup Sandstones. Lots of fun!
The shutting down of darn near everything in March has led to talks on-line to the Indonesian Society of Petroleum Ex-
plorationists (214 attendees) and talks to ENI in Milan (62 attendees). If on-line presentations do one thing, they really
boost the number of people from around the world who can hear scientific talks and interact with each other across sub-
stantial distances, and time zones!
In May, we presented our very first on-line SAND Members annual Meeting for our industry consortium. Our consorti-
um is celebrating its 20th year of industry support on 2020 and we were able to present our research to over 200 partici-
pants from several companies over two ½ days of talks. I was proud of the students who continue to make progress in
their careers despite the drama going on around them. This is a difficult time for anyone trying to build a career in the
energy industry. Internships have been cancelled, delayed or gone to remote formats, which leave young scientists una-
ble to really experience working in an industry setting. However, they are learning new skills in remote teamwork and
we continue to grow. Funding of the consortium has been challenging this year, as we have gone systematically from
~$325,000 in funding in 2019 to $135,000 in 2020, and 2021 looks to be even more challenging. The energy industry is
nothing if not volatile and we will manage as we have always done, through innovation of our science to meet industries
changing needs. I and my colleagues; Drs. Zane Jobe, Piret Plink-Bjorkland, Brandon Dugan (GP) and Louis Zerpa (PE)
are embarking in the coming year on a fact finding and design mission to look at how companies wish to interact in the
future through funded research. Through this effort, supported by the CSM VP for Research, we hope to come up with
some new models for how this will happen and bring more successful partnerships to not only the Department but to the
University as a whole.
A bright light at the end of the 2020 COVID tunnel is that our students have responded this year with a record number of
publications. We currently have published, in press or in review over 14 publications in peer-reviewed journals, special
publications and volumes. Publications from the rift basin research, work in the deposits of the Miocene Riffian Corridor
of Morocco, ongoing mass failure studies and statistical analysis of deepwater reservoir architectures are but a few of the
topics that are in press.