9 Dr. Estella Atekwana Department Head; Regents Professor and Sun Chair; Biogeophysics; Near Surface Geophysics; Tectonophysics I hope this newsletter meets you all in good health. As usual my life is always very hectic. I taught my electrical and electromagnetic methods in exploration and had a group of very lively students. The class culminated in a hands‐on project on the Norman landfill site in Norman, OK. The students applied their knowledge to the site and mapped the leachate plume. The students did an excellent job and will be presenting their results at the 2017 Symposium for the Application of Geophysics to Environmental and Engineering Problems to be held in Denver, March 20‐23, 2017. June 6‐8, 2016 I was in Aarhus, Denmark attending 4th International Workshop on Induced Polarization. I learned a lot about elucidating petrophysical properties from IP measurements. Following the meeting, I went to Dubai and spent a week with our daughter Kyra who is now working in Dubai and also visited with my former PhD student Dr. Khalid Saleh who is now the Chair of the Geology Department at the United Arab Emirates University, Al Ain. I had the chance to go up the Burj Khalifa which stands at 828 m. In September I attended the GSA Annual Meeting in Denver where I received the GSA Fellow and in October I was in Dallas at the SEG meeting to receive the 2016 Outstanding Educator Award. In December I attended the AGU meeting in San Francisco and gave an invited presentation and several other were made by my students and collaborators. We had a very good OSU showing at all the national meetings this year. In September there was some flurry of activity around here following the September 3, 2016 Mw 5.8 Pawnee earthquake. I went out with several of students to investigate liquefaction features associated with the earthquake. It turns out that the liquefaction features were all located in areas underlain by Quaternary alluvial sediments of the Arkansas River and the Black Bear Creek. We now know that areas underlain by Quaternary alluvial deposits in central Oklahoma are zones of potential surface deformation for any future large earthquakes. We also obtained a NSF‐ RAPID grant and acquired some magnetotelluric data to map any saline fluids associated with the seismicity. My research group continues to be very active and my PhD student Andrew Katumwehe successfully defended his dissertation. MS students Sundeep Sharma (MS now with Devon) and JK Harding (now with Chesapeake) and Emanuel Njinju (starting PhD at Virginia Tech) all defended their MS thesis. Two new students joined my research group David Beckendorff (Texas A&M) and Micah Mayle (Missouri State) joined my research group. I also have three undergraduate students working with me. On the home front, Kyra is in Dubai for another year. Kyle now works in North Carolina, Nissi my nephew is a sophomore at OSU and Fungtu is a sophomore at Georgia Tech. Please drop by to say hello when next you are in Stillwater. I hope to see many of you at the banquet on March 25th, 2016!! Dr. Michael Grammer Professor; Chesapeake Energy Chair of Petroleum Geology; Carbonate Sedimentology and Stratigraphy, Petroleum Geology Greetings alumni and friends of the BPSG: The past year has been another one filled with lots of activitiy, research, travel and student engagement. Beth Vanden Berg (PhD) defended her dissertation on nano‐ scale pore systems in carbonate mud rocks in May of 2016 and is now down in Houston with BP. She has been asked to chair a technical session on carbonate pore systems at the SEPM/CSPG Mountjoy meeting this summer. Lara Jaeckel (MS, now with Chesapeake) and Keller Flinton (MS, now with American Energy Partners) both defended their theses last Spring on regional sequence stratigraphy and reservoir characterization of the Mississippian of the Mid‐Continent, and Scott Shelley (MS, now with Concho in Midland) defended his thesis this past summer on 3‐D reservoir modeling of the Meramec from quarry exposures. Former students Buddy Price (MS) Taylor Thompson both won best paper awards from the Mid‐Continent AAPG meeting last year. Taylor won the Planalp Award for Best Poster for her fracture work and Buddy won the A.I. Levorsen Award for the Best Paper of the entire conference. Current student Ibukun Bode (PhD student) continues with her work on NMR response in micro‐ to nano‐scale pore systems and won an award for a presentation at the NABG this past Fall. Yulun Wang (PhD student) has a paper that has been accepted in the AAPG MISS Memoir on his research into fracture characterization and contribution to reservoir quality in the MISS mudrocks Students acquiring GPR data at liquefaction sites in Pawnee
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjAxMjk=