Research Professor Frank L. Brown and wife Linda spent the month of February in South Africa courtesy of Petrosa, the South African national exploration company, and Exxoteq, a marine drilling company headquartered in Calcautta and Dubai.

The 16-hour non-stop from Atlanta to Johanisburg on the latest 600 series Airbus was a new experience, especially since old pilot Frank could view the monster on the cabin video screen from a forward-mounted video camera mounted at the top of the vertical stabilizer—providing a pilot’s eye view!

Frank gave a three-day presentation on seismic and sequence stratigraphy for post-Apartheid minority geologists and geophysicists at Petrosa. He lost his slides enroute (later recovered by Delta and SAA) and presented the course with colored pens and a flip chart board. If you know him, that sounds incredible! But the participants said that that type of presentation was much better for them than slick slides or Powerpoint images. Frank also discussed a new petroleum geology program with a Cape Town geophysics professor who is organizing a 3-way cooperative effort at the University of Cape Town, Western Cape University, and Stellenbosch University.

He also reviewed Exxoteq’s seismic and wireline log data from offshore Angola, Ghana, and Gabon, as well as a rift prospect in the offfshore South African Outeniqua Basin for Petrosa. He made his second trip through the lowveld game reserve area (private reserves and Kruger Park) along the Mozambique border. It was Linda’s first game tour south of Kenya, where she lived for several years, but she says that the South African elephants were just as aggressive! With 402 months of employment at UT, Frank hopes again to accrue enough vacation to do another similar trip, especially when expenses are paid simply for talking about stratigraphy and looking at seismic lines.