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SEPM Research Groups

The SEPM Sequence Stratigraphy Research Group met on Monday evening March 11th. Approximately 25 people attended the session. The topic of this year's meeting was "Loop-scale Seismic Stratigraphic Analysis". Presentations were made by Henry Posementier of Anadarko, Jim Thompson of BP, and Art Donovan of BP. Henry showed images of deep-water sinuous channel systems from the shallow subsurface. Jim showed images of a variety of deep-water features (fans, mass transport complexes, etc.) from the shallow subsurface of a minibasin of the Gulf of Mexico. Art showed images of slope-channel complexes from the Pleistocene of offshore Angola. Two main topics came up in the discussions. The first was the desire to produce similar images from shallow-water systems. Janok Bhattacharya of UT Dallas was particularly interested in pairing up with companies that would be willing to let students work on the shallow portions of their 3-d seismic data to produce such images. The second discussion item focused on a proposal to merge SEPM clastic research efforts at the national AAPG Meetings. Since the sequence stratigraphy research group has historically covered deep-water research topics at least 50% of the time, the general consensus was that there was little need for separate Deep-water and Sequence Stratigraphy Research Groups Meetings at the National AAPG meeting. It was felt that both groups were diluting and fragmenting the clastic research efforts at the annual meeting. The concensus of the audience was for a single "Clastic Research Group" effort at the 2003 National AAPG Meeting. Finally, Art Donovan stepped down as the co-chair of the Research Group. Working with Andy Pulham (Memorial: Pulham@mum.ca), who will continue as co-chair, is Ron Steel of the University of Wyoming (RSteel@wyo.edu).