Advances in virtual globes and Keyhole Markup Language (KML) are providing the Earth scientists with the universal platforms to manage, visualize, integrate and disseminate geospatial information. In order to use KML to represent and disseminate subsurface geological information on virtual globes, we present an automatic method for modeling and visualizing a large volume of borehole information...

A suite of surface and basal measurements during and after borehole drilling is used to perform in situ investigation of the local basal drainage system and pressure forcing in western Greenland. Drill and borehole water temperature were monitored during borehole drilling, which was performed with dyed hot water. After drilling, borehole water pressure and basal dye concentration were measured ...

Crossover of the dispersion of flexural waves recorded in borehole cross-dipole measurements is interpreted as an indicator of stress-induced anisotropy around a circular borehole in formations that are isotropic in the absence of stresses. We have investigated different factors that influence flexural wave dispersion. Through numerical modeling, we determined that for a circular borehole surro...

Measuring the electrical field induced by a borehole Stoneley wave is a new method for characterizing a rock formation around a borehole. Our field measurements demonstrate that the Stoneley-wave-induced electrical field can be detected in sedimentary rocks (dolomite in our experiment), and that the amplitude of this electroseismic phenomenon can be used to detect isolated fractures and permeab...

For a robust way of estimating time shifts near horizontal boreholes, we have developed a method for separating the reflection responses above and below a horizontal borehole. Together with the surface reflection data, the method uses the direct arrivals from borehole data in the Marchenko method. The first step is to retrieve the focusing functions and the updown wavefields at the borehole lev...

Few in the Australian oil patch were familiar with the term 'borehole breakout' when David Lowry alerted PESA Journal readers to this phenomenon (1990, v.17, p. 43-44). Ten years later, few are unfamiliar, with breakouts having been reported in every Australian basin subject to significant drilling activity. This change witnesses the dramatically increased awareness of borehole geomechanics in ...

Theoretical models for the thermal response of vertical geothermal boreholes often assume that the characteristic time of variation of the heat injection rate is much larger than the characteristic diffusion time across the borehole. In this case, heat transfer inside the borehole and in its immediate surroundings is quasi-steady in the first approximation, while unsteady effects enter only in ...

This paper presents a wellbore-stability study of the San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth (SAFOD) research borehole located near Parkfield, California, USA. In the summer of 2005, the SAFOD borehole was drilled successfully through the active trace of the San Andreas Fault (SAF) in an area characterized by fault creep and frequent microearthquakes. In this study, we report how the analysis o...

The vadose zone beneath the USDOE’s Hanford Site in southeastern Washington State (Fig. 1) received approximately 1 trillion liters (450 billion gallons) of liquid waste, some contaminated with radioactive and hazardous contaminants. Today, Hanford is engaged in the world’s largest environmentalcleanup project, and a variety of conceptual and mathematical vadose zone models have been developed ...

Formation elastic properties near a borehole may be altered from their original state due to the stress concentration around the borehole. This could lead to a biased estimation of formation elastic properties measured from sonic logging data. To study the effect of stress concentration around a borehole on sonic logging, we first use an iterative approach, which combines a rock physics model a...