HGS Environmental and Engineering Dinner Meeting

"Listening to Karsts: Do Sinkholes Make a Noise?"

Speaker: Peter M. Duncan

April 9, 2025

Location: Los Tios restaurant located at 9527 Westheimer RD, Houston.
Social 5:30 p.m., Dinner 6:30 p.m., Presentation 7:30- 9:00 p.m.
Cost: $35 Pre-registered members; $40 non-members & ALL walk-ups
To guarantee a seat, you must pre-register on the HGS website and pay with a credit card.

Summary:  The “day lighting” of karst features (sinkholes) beneath surface structures is responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars of damage every year. Geophysical techniques are often used to detect buried sinkholes and subsurface voids prior to construction to facilitate mitigation of the hazard. However, detecting karst development after construction can be an intractable problem for many kinds of facilities. This presentation will discuss a novel, now proven approach to detecting the growth of karst related sinkholes using an array of permanently installed geophones and passive seismic analysis. The system has been shown to provide an early warning of the hazard in a time frame that allows for intervention and prevention of any consequent disaster.

Speaker:

Peter M. Duncan

Peter M. Duncan is President and CEO of MicroSeismic, Inc. a Houston based geophysical service company specializing in microseismic monitoring for oilfield, environmental and geotechnical engineering applications.  He holds a Ph.D. in Geophysics from the University of Toronto.  His early career as an exploration geophysicist was with Shell Canada and then Digicon Geophysical, first in Calgary then in Houston. In 1992 he was one of 3 founders of 3DX Technologies Inc., a publicly traded independent oil and gas exploration company. Duncan was 2003-04 President of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG) and 2020-21 President of the Geophysical Society of Houston (GSH). Duncan was the Fall 2008 SEG/AAPG Distinguished Lecturer speaking on the subject of Passive Seismic at 45 venues around the world. He is an Honorary Member of SEG, the Canadian Society of Exploration Geophysicists (CSEG), the Geophysical Society of Houston (GSH) and the European Association of Geoscientists and Engineers (EAGE). He received the Enterprise Champion Award from the Houston Business Journal in 2010, the World Oil Innovative Thinker Award in 2011, and was the 2013 EY National Energy Entrepreneur of the Year. In 2014 he received the Virgil Kauffman Gold Medal from SEG. In 2024 he received the Cecil Green Enterprise Award from SEG.