Thank you for your acknowledgement of our situation. I fear for the global community as well as our own. I've been ignoring news and focusing on geology.
I remember hearing that Russian geologists were among the last to accept the idea that horizontal crustal movement was an important factor in structure developmnt. Maybe not surprizing since the vertical processes - horsts and grabens - you describe were so important in Russian economic geology
Thanks much! I think Ronald Turnbull may have more than a spot of geological knowledge himself. He recently wrote an excellent article on limestone in his admirable newsletter.
Very informative of processes I wasn't even aware of. Would it be fair to say that one could do natural gas field exploration without the use of magnetometers but by looking for areas of large gas release?
I'd say that in a basin with so much natural gas like the West Siberian, with gas seeping up a lot, you'd know very well that there was gas down there, but the exact locations of traps might be problematic (the gas just blows around in the air; only a few places would likely represent clear-cut subsurface locations). Early oil fields were located based on positions of oil seeps at the surface; then, as we began to understand the ways source, reservoir, traps, and seals work, things like surface anticlines were targeted. There is a post in the PDF linked on this page ( https://richardigibson.substack.com/p/posts-on-the-history-of-geology ) about one of the first anticlines drilled deliberately in the search for oil. Geophysical exploration methods (seismic, gravity, magnetics) did not really take off until the 1920s (and really, not too much until after WW II), and plenty of fields were found before then, albeit in a fair number of significant cases luck was as important as science. Exploration in the West Siberian Basin would have been far, far more expensive and lengthy without geophysical methods.
We care from afar Richard. Keep up your good work.
Thank you for your acknowledgement of our situation. I fear for the global community as well as our own. I've been ignoring news and focusing on geology.
Thanks. I anticipate repeating that from time to time, but I do want to keep this focused on science, if I can.
I remember hearing that Russian geologists were among the last to accept the idea that horizontal crustal movement was an important factor in structure developmnt. Maybe not surprizing since the vertical processes - horsts and grabens - you describe were so important in Russian economic geology
Yes, I think very much so.
Thanks much! I think Ronald Turnbull may have more than a spot of geological knowledge himself. He recently wrote an excellent article on limestone in his admirable newsletter.
Yes, indeed.
So that escaping methane is presumably adding to global warming, at least in the short term.
Oh yes, most definitely. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/ticking-timebomb-siberia-thawing-permafrost-releases-more-methane-180978381/
Very informative of processes I wasn't even aware of. Would it be fair to say that one could do natural gas field exploration without the use of magnetometers but by looking for areas of large gas release?
I'd say that in a basin with so much natural gas like the West Siberian, with gas seeping up a lot, you'd know very well that there was gas down there, but the exact locations of traps might be problematic (the gas just blows around in the air; only a few places would likely represent clear-cut subsurface locations). Early oil fields were located based on positions of oil seeps at the surface; then, as we began to understand the ways source, reservoir, traps, and seals work, things like surface anticlines were targeted. There is a post in the PDF linked on this page ( https://richardigibson.substack.com/p/posts-on-the-history-of-geology ) about one of the first anticlines drilled deliberately in the search for oil. Geophysical exploration methods (seismic, gravity, magnetics) did not really take off until the 1920s (and really, not too much until after WW II), and plenty of fields were found before then, albeit in a fair number of significant cases luck was as important as science. Exploration in the West Siberian Basin would have been far, far more expensive and lengthy without geophysical methods.