Petroleum geologists find hydrocarbons. That might matter as near 2009AD supposedly 100 million faced famine as a result of oil value speculations. Finding vast amounts of cheap oil is thus beneficial. (unless of course you approve of famine as a persuador to social or technological change)
geologists have these spiffy core samples, actual long tubes of mineral. whenever a new hypothesis or oil value strategy occurs sometimes large numbers of these cores are recharacterized optically, chemically, isotopically etc.
I suggest placing a long piece of sticky tape lengthways on each core to gather regiospecific dribbles then spooling the tape on a cassette. Then spiffy new spectrometers, photonics, possibly even chemical readers are able to automatically characterize the samples, rather than a geologist making a little sample, making a measurement, then entering the data. if sticky tape isnt sufficient, a tiny abrader could generate a fresh microgram surface sample as the tape is placed.
The reason to do this is there are huge preexisting core libraries that can be reprospected to find hydrocarbons as well as other valuable minerals automatically.
Possible example vitrinite reflects a different amount of light depending on when the hydrocarbon it is with was formed. Suddenly a fun new geoprospecting hypothesis suggests that vitrinite of a particular reflectance number when carbonates are near is highly correlated with oil. The scientist (link) could look at all those core samples, individually, or better, just run the tape to see if its true
If the new technique correlates to resources then the petroleum company could just run the entire tape library to see which among thousands or tens or thousands of producing or test areas have the attractive predicted geology.
.5b follks might have a little fun with petroleum geology. at 10 trillion US$ per year, or an entire quadrillion US$ per century it is an area where a new idea could bring lots of value to lots of people. Yet there are only 1560 US patents with petroleum geology as words. The video of a petroleum geologist at work shows enough actual content to think of some new ideas.
I have this new thing where I try to think of 3 new petroleum geology ideas a day as a kind of humanitarian thing. This is from today, some others are at the video (link). As usual all my ideas are public domain.
mildly suggest science:geology as a category-- beanangel, Apr 26 2012 A petroleum geologist talks about her work http://www.youtube....er_detailpage#t=88s"months to restudy thousand wells" so I think on tape that could be a couple days [beanangel, Apr 26 2012] casually clueless petroleum geology ideas http://www.youtube....watch?v=GLoDWz-j-0sa bunch of apparently new public domain petroleum geology ideas I thought of. You are actually better off reading the description which is highly similar to the video text. The video also contains an idiotic part when I compare solitons to compression waves. [beanangel, Apr 26 2012] Play it through a cassette player and you get babble, I imagine?-- UnaBubba, Apr 26 2012 musicians are sometimes ahead of their time. all those years of rock, going on tape. obviously Dylan & Jagger were trying to tell the scientists something-- beanangel, Apr 26 2012 Yeah, looking back at the Stones... it's like Rock Geology...-- UnaBubba, Apr 26 2012 Most geological tests that I'm aware of require more than micrograms, and they're often destructive to the samples. At least in the mining industry.-- FlyingToaster, Apr 26 2012 The surface of the core is going to have all sorts of unrepresentative contaminants; drilling muds, portions of adjacent layers, metals from the core drill itself.
The core needs to have all this carefully removed in a clean environment before any meaningful analysis can be performed. An adhesive-coated tape is going to collect material fairly promiscuouusly.-- 8th of 7, Apr 26 2012 Jesus, [8th], I simply cannot believe you used the word "promiscuously" on a [beanie] post. The medication reduction program was going so well, too.-- UnaBubba, Apr 26 2012 I like this, because it suggests an approach to geology which is similar to analyses in biology, which have undergone a better-than-Moore's Law expansion in recent years.
I think that, rather than a tape, you'd be better off with an array, carrying small powdered samples taken from (say) 1mm intervals along the core. With the right format, such an array could be analysed by optical means, by various chemical assays, X-rays, mass spec...all sorts.
I don't know how widely core samples are accessible, or whether there are any centralized repositories for data. I suspect not.
Perhaps we should collectively undertake the "Geome Project", with the aim of determining the minerals present at vertical intervals of 1mm, on a grid spacing of (say) 1km, over the entire earth.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Apr 26 2012 There are an infinite number of regiospecific dribbles. How would one know in advance that reflectance of vitrinite (for example) would be one of those that should be captured to tape?
the long sticky magnetic tape physically attached to the cores seems very retro.-- bungston, Apr 26 2012 I don't think it's a magnetic tape. I think he's suggesting just using adhesive tape to peel off and store a very thin layer of mineral from the surface, for later analysis by whatever means become available.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Apr 26 2012 // collectively undertake … determining the minerals present at vertical intervals of 1mm, on a grid spacing of (say) 1km, over the entire earth //
… which would be best achieved by slicing your planet very, very thinly …-- 8th of 7, Apr 26 2012 /very thin layer/
That makes a lot more sense. I read it as sort of like etching the code for a digital photograph of a thing into the thing.-- bungston, Apr 26 2012 [beany], in the 'scrip of your second link, are you referring to _yourself_ as "casually clueless" and "idiotic?"-- Alterother, Apr 26 2012 >… which would be best achieved by slicing your planet very, very thinly …
I was thinking the same, but slightly less destructively, using high-powered water jets to perform an apple peel type slice of the underlying geology. Probably wouldn't be that informative, but look nice.
>unless of course you approve of famine as a persuador to social or technological change
If we could refer to the famine of new or interesting ideas for the tv/film business, it's definitely not working...-- not_morrison_rm, Apr 26 2012 Hmm...-- RayfordSteele, Apr 27 2012 thinking about it "perform an apple peel type slice of the underlying geology." might lead to a north-south divide..-- not_morrison_rm, Apr 28 2012 But you can take a thin(er) piece of tape and overlay that on your current tape. And produce a NEW smaller tape. And do that several times over. At the end of it, all you may need is the hair of a local and two read heads in the form of sticks, one in each hand.-- 4whom, Apr 28 2012 I appreciate the replies
as an actual technology it could be made better as a disc, where a robot grabs a 1/10 mm blob of authentic core, then autoplaces them on a circle, which can then be read with much more rapid access. There is even the possibility of playing the discs at a beam spectrometor or remicrosampling them-- beanangel, May 03 2012 random, halfbakery