U.S.-Germany Cooperative Research on Three-Dimensional Regionalization and Modeling for Sedimentary Basin Analysis

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This award supports John C. Davis and several colleagues and students of the Energy Research Center of the University of Kansas to collaborate in geological research with Jan Harff and others of the Mathematical Geology Department of the Central Institute for the Physics of the Earth, Potsdam, Germany. The two groups have been independently engaged in improving methods for regional geological modelling while working locally to model the North German depression and the Western Kansas shelf. They are now combining their fundamentally different modelling approaches to produce a new and stronger modelling process, based on three- dimensional regionalization. A further and more significant objective of their collaboration is to produce computer software, running interactively on a graphical computer workstation, that can easily be used for the regionalization and modeling of any sedimentary basin. Three-dimensional regionalization is a quantitative process that seeks to divide a sedimentary basin into discrete parts that are simultaneously as homogeneous and distinct as possible in their characteristics, and also as geographically compact as possible. The resulting subdivisions can then be treated as discrete entities, greatly simplifying both static and dynamic modelling of the basin. There is increasing need for improved methods of basin analysis in order to locate energy and water resources and to predict fluid movement for environmental purposes. Implementation of this greatly enhanced method of basin analysis in software operable in a workstation environment will have a substantial impact beyond the field of sedimentary geology. A further contribution of this collaboration is that it links fundamental concepts of geostatistical theory with computer methodologies that have been developed relatively independently in the Eastern bloc and in the West. The valuable developments in this area of quantitative geology by scientists of the former socialist countries of Europe and the USSR (including Dr. Harff and his group at Potsdam) are not widely known. Basically, the "eastern " approach focused on the discovery and description of discontinuous aspects of geological structures and processes, while "western" researchers have tended to focus on the continuous aspect of geological properties.