Agile blog highlights

Agile Geoscience blog reading for the uninitiated. These links will fast track and kickstart AAPG Imperial Barrel Award (IBA) contestants and exploration teams.

Useful things
Basic cheatsheet

Geophysics cheatsheet

Rock Physics cheatsheet

Petrophysics cheatsheet

Petroleum cheatsheet

Practical things
The Agile Interpreter's Canon — a list of strategy and guidelines for seismic interpretation.

How to create your own time scale — build and editable and fit-for-purpose stratigraphic column.

How to make a stratigraphic column — build and editable and fit-for-purpose stratigraphic column.

Visual crossplotting — use color spaces for multiple attributes and co-located images for dramatic comparisons and maps.

How to cheat at spot the difference — take the hard work out of visual inspection.

The integration gap — a graphical representation of empirical and disciplinary silos in the subsurface.

Wherefore art thou, expert? — long live the unvested generalist!

How to cheat — using the rock physics cheatsheet.

Software and images you might need
Geophysics apps FTW — calculators and geoscience applications for Android.

Volumetrics on the back of a digital envelope — volume* Android app.

Building tune — building and Android app for studying thin bed resolution and tuning.

Tuning geology — wedge models for bed thickness and determining seismic tuning effects.

Reuse and recycle — awesome graphics from Matt Hall's petroleum geology course. Yours to augment and build on!

Polarity cartoons — what is a peak and what is a trough? Every seismic display should have not only a colorbar in the legend, but also the polarity displayed. Don't leave your audience guessing.

How big is that volume? — Wolfram Alpha widget for computing the disk size of seismic data.

How to choose an image format — pick the right image format for the job.

When to use vectors not rasters — difference between vector graphics and raster images.

Geophysics terminology
A is for amplitude - the first and foremost of seismic attributes.

B is for bit depth - know the difference between resolution and precision in this great example.

C is for clipping — understanding data ranges and the losses in clipping.

D is for domain — back an forth between the seismic dimensions, and the earth's three spatial dimensions.

E is for envelope — a seismic trace attribute

E is for envelope 2 — a seismic trace attribute with real example

F is for frequency — definition of frequency and it's expression in common geophysics signals.

G is for gather — acquisition and processing jargon

H is for horizon — an overly mis-used and abused jargon word.

I is for integrated trace — another seismic attribute. Kind of like a quick and dirty relative impedance inversion.

M is for migration - the process of refining the focus of a seismic image. With great diagrams and gotchas.

O is for offset - Both a parameter and a dimension used a throughout seismic data processing.

Concepts you need to know
What is a Darcy? — Build your intuition with this permeability example

What is shale? — definition

What is AVO? — introduction to the AVO effect.

What do you mean by average? — be specific about how you do basic statistics

Location, location, location — information you need to properly locate a point on the earth.

Rocks, pores, and fluids — The basics of formation evaluation, and the so-called Triple Combo.

The effective medium — The whole is not attained by the disparate measurement of it's parts.

Philosophy and intuition builders
Confirmation — bias in geoscience

Confounded paradox

Must read geophysics — three papers that will change the way you think.

Will this change anything? — a message to consider with every endeavor

Smaller than they look — numbers, figures, and phenomena outside our normal levels of comprehension

Reliable predictions of unlikely geology — Bayesian statistics with nice examples.

Shooting in the dark — precision, accuracy, reproducibility are all measures of uncertainty.

Four days of oil — an example that will stick. On how much the world consumes in a four day period.

Innovations of the decade — great achievements in that last decade.

Innovations of the decade to come – what we might expect.

Measuring value — how does your professional work affect the bottom line?

More than a blueprint — seeing is believing, but in the case of the subsurface, seeing can be misleading.

The power of stack — concept of increasing signal to noise raio.

Species identification for the rock kingdom - empirical taxonomy.

Bring it into time — the travel time domain

On brevity — effective in writing, presenting and working.

What is unconventional? — definitions of the buzzword.

Shale vs tight — our most clicked blog post.

Great geophysicists #3 — dispersion phenomena.

The scales of geoscience — graphic of spatial scales of earth processes.

Seeing red – some aspects of what makes an effective figure.

Pair picking — a plea for working as a tag-team of interpreters.

Are you a poet or a mathematician? — words of estimative probability

McKelvey's reserves and resources — improved graphic that battles against ambiguity in communication.

Please sir may I have some seismic petrophysics? — what petrophysics needs to offer geophysicists and seismic interpreters.