cc: file, Diane Cluff, Darrell and Nancy Krueger, Pauline Nelson via mail, Sara and Des Penny, Grandma Hafen via Tony Hafen, Claude and Katherine Warner, and Lloyd and Luana Warner.
"I am at Claude and Katherine Warners in Bloomingon. They live next door to Uncle Lloyd and Aunt Luana. This is a few miles south of St. George, which is 45 miles south of Cedar City. In these three sentances I have attempted to draw a map in your mind. The 1910 Encyclopaedia Britannica defined a map as 'a representation, on a plane and a reduced scale, of part or the whole of the earth's surface.' This definition comes from a book I am reading in preparation for a couple of talks I give in a week and a half in Norway. The book is called 'Mapping The Next Millennium, The Discovery of New Geographies.'
I started reading the book on the flight from Houston Hobby Airport to the Las Vegas Airport on Friday. I almost missed the flight, and the last seat available was facing the back at the very front of the plane. I was sitting across from a metaphysicist named Merry Mount. She seemed determined to give me a bad time, starting with putting her feet up on the arm of my chair, and continuing on asking what the book I was reading was about. When I told her 'maps,' she said 'Sure!' It started an interesting conversation that lasted all across Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and into Nevada. The other four people sitting with us were from Alabama. I educated them about circular crop irrigation systems, about waste water from oil fields, about the large meteor crater, about the Grand Canyon, and in general about the importance of maps in our every day life. It was fun. The folks from Alabama changed their plans to drive up to Snow's Canyon, Zion, and Cedar Breaks instead of staying in Vegas.
I remember drawing a lot of maps when I was a kid. Dad's farm had approximately the same shape as the state of Utah. I had mapped all of my secret hiding places: Darrels Treehouse, the old cement water tank, Darrels clubhouse in the old barn, the grain storage bins at the lower plant, the old cottonwood tree halfway down the bottom fields, the old stream channel, the sagebrush on the northwest corner of the farm, the silage pits, my tree house, etc. I drew maps to show where I had hidden some of my special stuff. I drew maps so I would know how to get away from the bad guys. I drew maps to tell my friends where to go. I drew maps because they are one of the fundamental tools we use to make sence of the world around us. I drew maps because I was an explorer. Hideki Yukawa, a Japanese physicist, wrote:
My first significant map was a map of the Base of the Quaternary Sediments under Yellowstone Lake. My big brother in the faternity, Bob Otis, had collected a sparker survey across Yellowstone Lake while I was on my mission. When I got back I did a Senior Thesis, as preparation for graduate school, and interpreted and mapped the base of the sediments. This map defined the extent of the caldera across the lake. Bob took the map and displayed it as a 3-D wireframe map in the 1973-74 school year. It was another ten years before this kind of map became common in oil and gas exploration and production.
My first map as a trainee at Mobil was Block F-10 of the Dutch North Sea. I have already mentioned how I used this map to create a series of stacked contours on transparency paper to create a 3-D model of subsurface geology. The science of our time has allowed us 'to measure and therefore to map, a breathtaking range of spatial domains (Mapping the Next Millennium, page 4). Geophysical exploration and the role I have had in developing new ways to evaluate geophysical and geological data, has been a leader in developing new domains and ways to map. The regional map I made of Argentina and Uruguay was a regular contour map, until I colored between the contours with a rainbow spectrum of colors. With workstations there are few maps today which do not show this spectrum of colors to highlight attributes like travel-time, depth, amplitude, etc.
My first major mapping project at Mobil was the Qua Ibo Unconforminty, and a series of time structure maps close to it. In making these maps my bosses taught me about trend maps, lows, highs, closures, and other things which I now just take for granted. When I got to the University of Houston's Seismic Acoustics Laboratory, it was natural to understand the geometric relationships of rock layers trunkating against an unconformity. The first significant physical manifestation of this map understanding was the SALNOR physical model. We modeled the heavily faulted top and base Statfjord and Brent horizons with clay, built a plaster-of-paris mold and then poured RTV Silicon Rubber into the molds to create the two producing layers with the three surrounding seals, or low porosity layers. These layers were all trunkated by the Base Cretaceous Unconformity, and overlain with a Cretaceous and Paleocene layer. This model of a series of geophysical maps taught me many lessons. One specific lesson was scale. A mosquito fell into the clear layer of RTV Silicone Rubber just above the unconformity. It turned out this mosquito scaled to approximately the size of a dinasour. When we collected synthetic seismic data in the physical modeling water tank, the results included a large diffraction pattern (bulls-eye) where the mosquito had settled.
I think this was the first time I realized maps are more than topography. Maps allow 'everyone from archaeologists to zoologists ... to discover, explore, chart, and visualize physical domains so remote and fantastic that the effort involves nothing less than the reinvention of the idiom of geography' (ibid. pages 4-5). I could imagine myself being the dinosaur, of having been buried for millions of years, and then of turning into an oil molecule and migrating to a trap. It was a whole new way of thinking. It was a new media. 'It has been only in the last ten to fifteen years that powerful desktop machines have become available for routine visualization of data - visualization in the sense that data is converted into a cartographic image of a spatial domain with distinct regions, contours, and patterns that allow scientists to derivde insight and meaning from the visual display of quantitative information' (ibid. page 12).
This week Roger Anderson of Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory coordinated a major presentation to Shell Shelf (Paul Sullivan's division). We displayed a major Shell Field in ways never done before. The 3-D seismic survey was loaded so we could dynamically move through it with a clipping plane. By orienting the clipping plane parallel to producing sands, which had a strong seismic response due to gas and oil content, it was possible to instantaneously see the extent of the reservoir. We had examples showing in 3-D how the pressure changed as fluid was injected for secondary recovery purposes. Then there was a model from a reservoir simulator showing particle movement to the wells. Lastly there was a derived model of the fluid content: oil, gas, and water and the ability to place a horizontal well path inside the fluids to be produced.
Maps today are dramatically changing. As mentioned earlier I am giving a couple of papers about immersive environments at a conference in Norway in a couple of weeks. This talk will be about these changes. I spent some time here in St. George talking to Grandma Hafen and some of her friends about how much things have changed. Imagine what it was like when she was born in 1905. Imagine the impact of technology over the last 100 years. Think of just one technology, automobiles, and the new transportation media they introduced. I went up to the St. George Airport and took pictures of the city and specifically the large road cut in the volcanic ridge on the east side of town. There is almost no place on earth where we do not see the impact of this new media. I couldn't get a mini-cassette recorder to work and so I bought a new one. Your cousin Bryan mapped out how I had simply bumped the pause button, and it worked just fine after he worked on it five minutes. New immersive environments promise to change our maps as much over your lifetime as automobiles have changed the topography maps over Grandma Hafen's lifetime.
I sure hope you each take the time to build and follow good maps."