lankygeologist: Science, Petroleum & Open*

Well tomorrow I am off to Carlton House Terrace for the launch of the Royal Society's report on Science as an open enterprise.

http://newsletters.royalsociety.org/q/1d7sKAj5lswb/wv

It's an idea of great interest to me, in the Oil & Gas Industry where do we draw the line between maintaining our commercial edge by protecting knowledge, and ensuring that we remain at the cutting edge of our professions as scientists? How important is Good Science!? Sven Treitel maintains that we must publish or perish... 52 Things You Should Know About Geophysics.

I look forward to a view of the issues, from outside the industry. Time allowing I'll also hope to be trialling OpenDTect over the next few weeks, making use of proprietary 2D and well data, publically available 3D and whatever else I can get my hands on. I'll try to remember to post a few of my findings.

For now, a plug for OpenDTect... http://www.opendtect.org/. You find seismic interpretation software that is free to share, and a free to use seismic dataset.

A few other resources below:-

Satellite Imagery - http://zulu.ssc.nasa.gov/mrsid/mrsid.pl
Digital Elevation Model - ftp://topex.ucsd.edu/pub/srtm30_plus
UK Onshore Geophysical Library - http://www.ukogl.org.uk/academic.htm
{Run by Lynx Information Systems; if you're in academia there are funds available, to make available seismic at no cost. Well locations and tops are also available...}
Opensource GIS - http://www.qgis.org/
Seismic Data Directory - http://www.geo.mtu.edu/spot/SeismicData/

I am often delighted by the variety and quality of freely available material, and thankfully, my perception is that the availability is growing.