News

Happy Birthday to Us!     Last month we celebrated 13 years of GRL’s existence. Crikey, we’re officially teenagers now!

A lot of fracture work this month … firstly, we’re busy extending our multi-client studies of fractured reservoirs in the Kurdistan region beyond the Jurassic and Triassic, so that we’re now also covering all the key Cretaceous carbonate units in detail, including Shiranish, Aqra, Bekhme, Kometan, Qamchuqa, Garagu, and Chia Gara Formations. Throughout the Zagros…

More earthquake studies – this month down under in New Zealand, following the 14th November 2016 M7.8 Kaikoura earthquake. As with our other recent earthquake studies, we’re using GNSS technology (Global Navigation Satellite System, including GPS) to record aftershocks along active faults, combined with UAV drone data and terrestrial lidar laser-scanning to analyse the surface ruptures…

Most of our recent research outputs, both at AGU last month and TSG this month, have focused on analysis of data from the large earthquake sequence in central Italy, in collaboration with academic colleagues across Europe. Just a few days after TSG, central Italy was once again rocked by M5.6 – M5.7 events, this time…

EAGE have a strong legacy of organising first-rate conferences and workshops on Middle East geology, and the “Sixth Arabian Plate Geology Workshop: Late Cretaceous and Early Tertiary (Arabian Plate Sequences 9 & 10)” was no exception. We presented our latest work on Tectonic Controls on Late Cretaceous to Eocene Zagros Deposition in Iran, Iraq &…

An update on our work to monitor seismicity in central Italy (see September News 2016)… This year we’ve developed a ruggedized GPS (i.e. GNSS) unit to provide continuous, high resolution monitoring of ground movement in relation to underground gas storage, cavern and mine flooding, or hydraulic fracturing. We currently have units deployed on operative gas…

This month we’re busy presenting a diverse sample of our work in fracture network characterisation and unconventionals at PETEX (UK’s largest subsurface-focussed E&P conference and exhibition). This includes some key results from our large multi-disciplinary analysis of Zechstein reservoir properties, based on outcrop, core and production data. Main image (above): Fantastic fractures, vugs and stylolites…

For us, one positive consequence of the current industry downturn is that we’ve been able to spend more time writing-up the results from a whole range of projects that we’ve not had time to publish over the last 10 or 12 years! So now we’re busy dusting-off a variety of different datasets, and working on…

We’re currently involved in the scientific rapid-response to the August 24th central Italy earthquake. We’re carrying out a campaign of fieldwork with university researchers from Durham, Leeds, Sheffield, Birkbeck, and UCL, in close collaboration with Italian colleagues. This involves structural mapping of the coseismic expression of the surface rupture, alongside investigation of ongoing postseismic deformation in…

Work is progressing well in the “New Appraisal of the Western Approaches Basins” project, which is financed by the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change and facilitated by the Oil and Gas Authority as part of the government’s initiatives to increase activity on the UKCS. We’re part of a multi-faceted consortium led by…