A large increase in drilling and production costs in the USA Shale Oil sector will likely slow the growth of production from the Permian Basins.
To just maintain production hundreds of new wells must be drilled each year due largely to the rapid decline in tight wells. In the Permian Basins in the last 15 years consolidation has been aggressive and while the largest producers, Chevron, Devon and ConocoPhillps have a sizeable drilling inventory smaller companies have exhausted their drilling locations.
Siem Reap has 98km of new roads and new sidewalks much of which has been paved with interesting felsic intrusive rocks from quarries in Shandong Province in China. The composition ranges from granodiorite to tonalite and is locally granophyric and pegmatitic. The intrusive consists dominantly of plagioclase, quartz, pyroxene and hornblende. Ovoid structures known as Miarolitic Cavities are evident in the sidewalks to the observant and indicates that the parental magma was hydrous. While no cavities have been observed in the sidewalks of Siem Reap it is quite possible that miarolitic cavities which retained cavities were not processed into saleable dimension stone. When the location of the quarry in Shandon Province is identified maybe a field trip is warranted.
The term miarolitic comes from the Italian miarole in reference to the mineral-rich pegmatite region of Baveno and Cuasso al Monte in northern Italy.
There are two types of miarolitic cavities observed. One has a coarsely pegmatitic core of intergrown quartz and plagioclase surrounded by a conspicuous pyroxene rim and the core may contain coarse tourmaline. The second type has a conspicuous leucocratic zone and a complex core of intergrown quartz and tourmaline. Where there are sufficient sections these features have a long axis that that is maybe 5 times the sectional axis.
Seen nearly edgewise, the turbulent disk of gas churning around a black hole takes on a crazy double-humped appearance. The black hole’s extreme gravity alters the paths of light coming from different parts of the disk, producing the warped image. The black hole’s extreme gravitational field redirects and distorts light coming from different parts of the disk, but exactly what we see depends on our viewing angle. The greatest distortion occurs when viewing the system nearly edgewise. Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman Download this and related multimedia from NASA Goddard’s Scientific Visualization Studio
I recently had a chat with the Artificial Intelligence application, ChatGPT. ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a chatbot launched by OpenAI in November 2022. It is built on top of OpenAI’s GPT-3 family of large language models, and is fine-tuned (an approach to transfer learning) with both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques.
A view from a drone into a crater at the 2021 Fagradalsfjall eruption, showing the transition from lava pond convection to low-intensity fountaining. Video by Leon Frey.
The Fagradalsfjall volcano in Iceland is located on the Reykjanes Peninsular which forms the onshore portion of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge system and erupted several times in 2021.
