Continuing with the theme of Critically Thinking and Avoiding Dogmas
By Ted Godo
Greetings, fellow HGS members. As the days grow warmer, the typically foggy and humid conditions allow us ample opportunities to clean the remaining leaves and mold and mildew from outdoor furniture and the house. Meanwhile, it seems the writers and editors are all aboard the Chicxulub train this month. Our Bulletin cover was a “must have” from Alamy to highlight the editor's “feature article” and celebrate the excellent dinner talk on Sponsorship Night by Andrew Madoff and Cody Miller of Chevron. Plus, I just received my February AAPG Explorer magazine, and what is featured on page 38 is an article on Chicxulub! Obviously, these three presentations were not coordinated as each has a different specific focus, but something must “be in the air” .… no groaning please.
In researching the feature article this month, I read that some authors referred to an “asteroid impact,” while others used the phrase “bolide impact.” So, what's the difference, you might say? Basically, there is no apparent difference, just in imagination. Let me explain. The main difference between a “bolide impact” and an “asteroid impact” is that an asteroid impact is less descriptive. It seems that we geologists invent different words for a similar thing, but then again, we tend to be “right-brained,” which contributes to artistry in our science. By definition, a “bolide impact” is characterized by a flamboyant type of asteroid appearing as a bright fireball that ignites/explodes in the atmosphere before impacting the Earth. No one was around at the time to characterize this flamboyant expression, but it was undoubtedly impressive.
Besides being an incredible event to write about, I wanted to continue focusing on a theme this year, which, for example, is always to ask how we think. Do we ask new questions and avoid dogmas by talking and listening to others' opinions? In the feature article, I titled it, “The Discovery Road to Chicxulub and the Creation of a World Class Breccia Reservoir.” How did I choose this title? In 1981, a young geoscientist felt he had discovered a shallow buried impact crater that was previously thought to be a volcano. PEMEX had just drilled and found an impressively thick and porous breccia at Cantarell, with its first production in 1979. Their model of deposition was a debris flow off the nearby Cretaceous margin. Despite ongoing drilling efforts and finding breccia within the KMZ field complex, numerous wells were cored without any modifications to the existing depositional model. PEMEX did not acknowledge that the breccia originated from Chicxulub until 2000. That’s 20 years of drilling and production. So, I asked myself a few specific questions after learning about the exploration and development of the field complex.
Do we listen to others' interpretations, such as the original observation/idea that an anomalous feature did not look like a volcano but rather an impact structure?
Do we occasionally call the idea names like “Glen’s sky rock”?
Do we sometimes become dogmatic in our models, like when we discovered a world-class, 300-meter-thick breccia and decided that our model of a talus debris flow could only be the right one?
Did we not look at the core in detail for possible impact-related debris?
Could development have happened differently if we had realized this breccia had a much more widespread and continuous permeability across all fields?
I also want to thank Wayne Camp for his thought-provoking technical article this month, “A Proposal to Reinstate the Wolfcamp Formation as a Formal Lithostratigraphic Unit, Delaware Basin, New Mexico and Texas.” His article complements the current theme, which addresses questions like, “Are we avoiding dogmatic models, or are we continuing to think critically and seek input from others on our questions?”
As a final reminder to all, please consider submitting technical or feature articles to the Bulletin. I could use your help for the April issue. Thank you and enjoy the coming Spring.