HISTORY MAKING DAYS (and nights)

We're in the midst of history-making days (and nights).

May 15, 2022 offers 85 minutes of a total lunar eclipse that begins at 11:29AM ET.  All that's required to witness the event is (1) clear skies, and (2) go outside and look.  

Midwest GeoSciences Group will join science-minded friends in Carmel, Indiana to watch the eclipse, but the real exciting topic of conversation will be these history making days where astrophysicists have captured the imagery of the massive black hole at the center of our own galaxy, the Milky Way Galaxy.

October 6, 2020 marked the Nobel Prize Award for confirming the existence of the supermassive black hole.  More than 300 people from about 90 institutions searched collectively for this confirmation using radio telescopes.  

The imagery for the black hole was released on May 12, 2022 at multiple press conferences simultaneously world-wide.  

These images alone do not tell the remarkable nature of these phenomenon.  

Scale of time and distance are nearly unfathomable.  We as geoscientists can appreciate how computer modeling is used to unravel the context of their size, distance, gravity, and spacetime.  May be we have it easy with stratigraphy, plate tectonics, and planetary progressions.  For astrophysicists, nature itself changes with the fabric of outer space. Right?  .... we can all appreciate the complexity of this phenomenon.

These are exciting times to live.  We are witnessing history every day with new research results about exoplanets, dark matter, blackholes, galaxy formation, quantum entanglement, particle physics and telescope technology.  

If you are working on an interesting project and would like to share it with us, we'd love to hear from you.    -Dan Kelleher

service ..at.. midwestgeo.com

Why Environmental Sequence Stratigraphy?

Why Environmental Sequence Stratigraphy?

May be first, let's recall it’s derivative, Sequence Stratigraphy.

In the most basic terms, Sequence Stratigraphy is a study of sedimentary deposits with respect to depositional environments and changes in sea level, sediment supply, and sediment-storage area through time.

Sequence Stratigraphy is the means to understand the subsurface architecture of marine sediments on the basis of understanding how depositional environments (and the resulting sediments) shift and change as sea level rises and falls.

Environmental Sequence Stratigraphy is a subsurface characterization approach applied to hydrogeologic and environmental projects based on understanding the geology. This approach allows us to understand the architecture of the sedimentary succession beneath our sites; that is, recognition not only of coarse- and fine-grained sediments in the succession, but their geometries, continuity, variability, and uniformity.

Isn’t the name of the game: understanding subsurface relationships !?  It's more than just mapping a secondary attribute such as soil classification, permeabilities, or contaminant occurrence.  Understanding subsurface relationship relies fully discerning the SOLE INDEPENDENT VARIABLE (i.e. depositional processes).  

So again, why Environmental Sequence Stratigraphy?   Call it anything you want.  Midwest GeoSciences Group has called it the “Sedimentary Stratigraphic Approach”, “Holistic Stratigraphy”, and “Holistic Hydrogeology” and we’ve even trademarked “Taking the Mystery Out of the Subsurface” along with creating an online training experience to do it.  

In the end, it’s the job we are hired to do as geoscience professionals: take the mystery out of the subsurface.