A map of the Gulf of Mexico covers an entire wall of geophysicist John Potter’s office at Amerada Hess Corp.’s Houston-based R&D lab. It is as complex as it is large, charting thousands of square miles of underwater terrain. Hand-drawn concentric circles and lines separate, into hundreds of square lease units, thousands of miles of ancient rock formations and subterranean cliffs available for offshore oil exploration. A much more detailed map, this one digital, is stored on Potter’s desktop computer. Created from sound waves and complex mathematical algorithms, it measures the density and composition of bedrock located miles beneath the Gulf floor that dates back, in some cases, to the days when dinosaurs walked the earth.
Link: CIO Insight
Category:
- Linux
