Transcript – Development of Expertise in Seismic Interpretation in Petroleum and Scientific Exploration

Welcome to Project 432 development of expertise in seismic interpretation in petroleum and scientific exploration. I’m Eric Riggs, professor of Geoscience Education in the Department of Geology and Geophysics. I will be your presenter today. This project seeks to understand the workflows and characteristic behaviors that lead practitioners to be successful at seismic interpretation. This is a remote sensing technique where reflections from subsurface structures from induced seismic waves are processed and interpreted to reveal buried geologic structures. This technique is widely used in the petroleum and minerals exploration industries and is also a valuable technique in fundamental scientific investigations. Most individuals learn these techniques as a graduate student, often supplemented by experience in industry internships. Entry level practitioners also gain experience in their formative years in industry. The process by which individuals gain expertise is not well understood, leaving the educational pathway uninformed by research on the best, most highly effective practices. This project replicates a simple seismic interpretation task in a laboratory setting to capture workflow and physical interaction with seismic data and imagery captured by video recordings and eye tracking. Volunteers worked for an hour to interpret the same seismic lines. All subjects were also interviewed about their interpretations and workflows immediately following their work sessions. These data were analyzed through a mix of qualitative and quantitative techniques, which were triangulated to uncover characteristics of expert behavior from these advanced employment ready graduate students. The suite of observations we were able to deploy thanks to T-3 program support was successful at showing key details of participants, thought processes and successful behaviors, which are all reported on the poster. Once we are able to once again safely collect data in an in-person setting as the pandemic eases, we intend to continue this work with classroom applications and tests, as well as work with our industry partners to test advanced professional seismic interpreters to further establish the expert gold state baseline. Thanks to the T-3 funding, we now have the intellectual and physical capacity to widen this avenue of research in the coming years. Thanks for your attention.