Conference Agenda

The geological exposures of the Jurassic Coast of North East England cover a variety of depositional systems, from both continental and marine settings, and provide an excellent opportunity for field training. In this virtual field tour, we will visit several localities along the Yorkshire coast.

Starting at Staithes we will look at the Middle Liassic Cleveland Ironstone Formation before proceeding south to Whitby for the alluvial sandstone of the Saltwick Formation. The exposures at Whitby comprise multi-storey sand bodies of fine- to medium-grained sandstone deposited in the hanging-wall of the Whitby fault and shows many different geological features at a variety of scales.

After journeying south, travelling up stratigraphy and past the fractured mudstones of Saltwick Nab, we will arrive at the exposures of Long Nab, and the Long Nab Member of the Scalby Formation. Here we will see an exhumed meander plane, usually only visible at low tide, showing both planform and vertical sections.

We will round off the excursion by travelling further south to Flamborough Head to look at the Late Cretaceous Chalks, with extensive faulting and fracturing, marl layers, stylolites and fault breccia.

The data for this virtual fieldtrip is assembled from a variety of sources including photogrammetric models collected both by Drone/UAV and by handheld camera, and lidar derived digital elevation data.

The field trip itself will be run using Virtual Reality Geological Studio (VRGS) from VRGeoscience Limited (www.vrgeoscience.com).

Late Jurassic carbonates of Saudi Arabia contain some of the the world’s most prolific oil-producing strata in super giant reservoirs. Small scale stratigraphic architecture and associated property and flow heterogeneities are poorly resolved in the inter-well scale of hundreds of meters because such heterogeneities are subseismic and beyond penetration of borehole logs. This blindspot leads to oversimplified reservoir models and simulations. However, analogous strata is spectacularly exposed in the outcrops along the Tuwaiq Mountain Escarpment, central Saudi Arabia.

This virtual field trip focuses on the Late Jurassic Hanifa Formation outcrops at Wadi Birk, central Saudi Arabia with an objective to highlight and display interwell scale heterogeneities associated with depositional architecture.

The drone-survey involved two-stages: (1) a complete (4x4 km²) nadir-view survey with a fixed-wings-drone (Wingtra), (2) high-resolution survey of cliff’s along mesas (>20 km) with DJI-M600 (hexacopter), where the drones were equipped with a Sony-RX1R-ii-42 MP camera. The imagery and Ground Control Points (laid before survey and accurately measured) were used to develop georeferenced high-resolution (cm-scale) 3D digital outcrop model (DOM) with Pix4D. The DOM is interpreted with VRGS to capture the formation architecture and dimensionality. The DOM is supplemented with geological (measured section, thin sections), petrophysical (spectral gamma ray), and geophysical (ground-penetrating-radar and shallow-seismic) datasets. The observations and results will be used as input into high-resolution static reservoir models to address the gap of our understanding in inter-well scale heterogeneities of similar subsurface hydrocarbon reservoirs.

The Book Cliffs of Eastern Utah is comprised of over 150 km of near continuous cliffs which contain a 500+ meter succession of Late Cretaceous shallow marine and coal-bearing coastal plain deposits. These unique outcrops record 3.5 million years of clastic-wedge progradation, from an uplifting mountain chain in the west into an epiric seaway to the east. These outcrops have been used extensively for research and teaching over the last 50 years. They have served as analogues to reservoir sections in the North Sea, Niger Delta, Gulf of Mexico, Brunei and other similar systems around the world. They have been used to further our understanding of sedimentology and, they were one of the early testing grounds for the concepts of high resolution sequence stratigraphy.

This multiscale virtual fieldtrip will look at keys aspects of the Book Cliffs from the basin to the pore scale. At the largest scale a 120 km cross section has been used to generate synthetic seismic lines to highlight the geometry and architecture of parasequence scale clinoforms. We will study shoreface parasequences and a series of intervals commonly interpreted as estuarine valley fills, overlying sequence boundaries. The section is long enough to be able to trace specific surfaces from the coastal plain, through the shoreface and into the offshore.

At the intermediate scale, a series of vertical outcrops have been used as the basis for field-scale reservoirs models that highlight the stratigraphic features that impact flow. A series behind outcrops cores and well logs are tied back to outcrops to illustrate the sampling and interpretation issues associated with well data. At the finest scale, 3D models have been built of SEM stubs to illustrate the microscopic, pore scale heterogeneities.

The presentation will be run live in Lime. A purpose-built virtual outcrop/virtual fieldtrip software developed at NORCE in Bergen. The presentation will show case the fantastic geology of the Book Cliffs and the potential of the virtual fieldtrip approach. We will illustrate the pros and cons of virtual fieldtrips and highlight their contribution to understanding reservoir analogues.