Researchers
are using laser-scanning technology to investigate both clastic and
carbonate systems and are finding that Optech's lidar (light detection
and ranging) system is a valuable tool for characterizing outcrops
rapidly and quantitatively. Outcrop faces are now placed readily into
navigable 3-D volumes that can be examined immediately in the field
and later interpreted on a workstation or PC. The high-resolution
digital terrain models are draped with conventional photographs and
corendered with attributes, such as a weathering profile (shape),
laser intensity (reflectivity), and multispectral data, producing
greatly enhanced data sets for examination. All these data are then
combined within the Gocad integration environment, and fine-scale
geologic models are the outcome. Clastic
research has focused on deepwater reservoir analogs. We have acquired
surveys from coastal California, northern and southern Spain, and
southern Chile. Carbonate outcrops include the Permian of West Texas,
the Cretaceous of Central Texas, and the Jurassic of Saudi Arabia. |
