The Bureau of Economic Geology will be closed from Monday, December 24, 2001 until Wednesday, January 2, 2002, as will all departments and offices of The University of Texas at Austin. Please feel free to leave Voice-mail and E-mail messages for Bureau staff. 12/17/01

PTTC Texas and Southwest regions joined forces to present a workshop titled "Optimized Horizontal Well Technology" in Midland on December 18, 2001. Instructor Bob Knoll, of Maurer Technology in Houston, presented this one-day program that covered well design and operational issues of borehole stability. [more] 12/21/01

Senior Research Scientist Dr. Bridget R. Scanlon was in San Francisco, California December 10-14, 2001 to attend and participate in the Annual Meeting of the American Geophysical Union. Bridget chaired a technical session titled "Evaluation of Unsaturated Flow Models, Recent Advances and Applications" and presented "Intercode Comparisons for Simulating Water Balance of Near-Surface Soils," a paper coauthored by Marty Christman, fellow Bureau researcher Robert C. Reedy, and Jirka Simunek. [Abstract] 12/17/01

The Bureau?s weekly seminar presentation was held Thursday, December 6, 2001 in the Main conference room. Senior Research Scientist
Dr. Bob Loucks presented "Characterizing the Three-Dimensional Architecture of a Coalesced, Collapsed-Paleocave System in the Lower Ordovician, Ellenburger Group by Integrating Ground-Penetrating Radar, Shallow-Core, and Outcrop Data." [Abstract] 12/05/01

The Austin Geological Society?s December meeting was held on Monday evening, December 3, 2001, from 7:00 to 8:00 p.m., at the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) Board Room, 1st Floor Hancock Building, 3701 Lake Austin Blvd. Bureau Senior Research Scientist Dr. Bruno C. Vendeville presented "The Weird Tectonics of Play Sand and Silly Putty." [Abstract] 11/30/01

Dr. Jon Olson, a co-principal investigator of the Fracture Research and Application Consortium (FRAC) at the Bureau, has just been granted tenure in the Department of Petroleum & Geosystems Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. Congratulations Jon! More information about Dr. Olson's research on fracture system modeling can be found at the FRAC's web area titled FracCity. 12/17/01