December News

Busy times! The paint has hardly dried on our upgraded multi-client “Regional Appraisal of Fractured Reservoirs in Kurdistan & NE Iraq” study (see last month’s News), but we’re busy again with a wide range of new projects…

First up is an exciting in-depth proprietary appraisal of unconventional plays in a major South American basin. This is already proving interesting in terms of new methodologies to analyse the relationship between mechanical stratigraphy and natural fracture systems. Hopefully we’ll be able to report more on this in coming months.

Also new this month is additional work with Sheffield University to compliment our use of low-cost GNSS technology to monitor post-seismic deformation – we’re now combining legacy UAV data with new lidar coverage to quantify co-seismic displacement on an exposed fault strand following the 14th November 2016 M7.8 Kaikoura earthquake.

This month we’ve also stress-tested the latest technical upgrades to our GNSS capabilities, and have successfully completed a full field-deployment of units able to regularly upload their data (via GSM) to our central servers. This new functionality now makes it possible for us to carry out near real-time processing for monitoring movement in a wide range of commercial applications and research projects. We’re already using this to investigate landslides and their possible link to seismic triggering in an area of active seismicity in Europe, and are in discussions regarding a number of other installations.

Finally, we’re well represented as usual in the winter academic conference season, and are co-authors on a number of presentations at AGU in California and the Tectonic Studies Group annual meeting in Plymouth.

Best wishes for the festive season!