Curtin/CSIRO Geophysics Group Seminar, 18th August 2022

Time-lapse impedance monitoring using borehole seismic amplitudes of earthquake waves

Date: Thursday, 18th of August, 2022
Time: 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM
Location: WA-Kensington-B2-F3-R00-Seminar Room, 26 Dick Perry Avenue, Kensington; Microsoft Teams

Speaker: Kitty Milliken, Bureau of Economic Geology, Jackson School of Geosciences, University of Texas at Austin

Abstract:

The fine-grained sediments and rocks that constitute most of the sedimentary record have received tremendous research attention in the past decade. This talk reviews some of the technologies that have supported these advances and summarizes current knowledge of the pore-scale processes that drive the evolution of bulk rock properties of mud in the subsurface.

Electron microbeam instrumentation has been central to improving our understanding of fine-grained sediment. In particular, improvements in resolution offered by field-emission electron guns and advances in sample preparation by various ion-milling techniques have allowed researchers to see tiny grains and pores in unprecedented detail. Grain assemblages in mudrocks vary across a very broad compositional range and the initial compositions in muds have significant implications for the evolution of properties relevant to reservoir quality in mudrocks.

It is now clear that the principal diagenetic processes of sandstones and limestones, compaction, and cementation, also operate in mudrocks. Quantification of compaction and cementation is central in the quest to refine a predictive understanding of the evolution of mudrock properties in the subsurface.

Biography:

Kitty L. Milliken is a Senior Research Scientist at the Bureau of Economic Geology, University of Texas at Austin. She received a B.A. in geology (1975) from Vanderbilt University and M.A. (1977) and Ph.D. (1985) degrees from UT Austin. Her research focuses on diagenesis of siliciclastic sediments and the evolution of rock properties in the subsurface. She has authored and co-authored over 120 peer-reviewed papers and digital resources for teaching sedimentary petrography. Her current work is focused on the application of electron microbeam imaging and analysis to interpret chemical and mechanical histories of mudrocks.