A Geophysicist’s voyage around South America José M. Carcione, OGS, Trieste, Italy  March 13. Universidad de La Plata, Argentina. When Aldo Vesnaver came to my room in January 2009 I suspected, as always, something unusual. Like me, Aldo is an active member of SEG, although he is more involved in the activities related to the Society. My only activity, apart from publishing papers and participating at the technical sessions of the Annual Meeting, is to be Assistant Editor of the Society journal Geophysics, which I consider an honor and an involved contribution from the point of view of dedication time and scientific rigor. Here then came Aldo proposing that I be the SEG’s 2009 Central and South America Honorary Lecturer (HL). But what is all this about? The SEG HL program was initiated in 2007 as a companion program to the long-established SEG Distinguished Lecture (DL) program, which consists in touring the world. It differs from the DL program in that it focuses on transfer of knowledge within a specific region, visiting the various SEG Sections and Student Chapters. Thanks to Shell’s sponsorship, the SEG Foundation is able today to offer Honorary Lecturers in six geographic regions. These activities promote the science of geophysics, education and scientific discovery, integrating scientific communities of under-developed countries to the mainstream of research and development. I admit that the idea of traveling through the continent was quite appealing from the beginning, and I accepted the challenge with the condition of visiting not more than ten cities. Although to be an HL one needs to resides in the specific continent, an exception was made in my case because my mother language is Spanish, since I was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I know some Portuguese, which is necessary in Brazil, although Portuñol, a mix of Spanish and Portuguese, can equally do well. After an exchange of e-mails with Greg Partyka, involved in the organization of the program, my subject was accepted.  March 16. Universidad de San Juan, Argentina. Las Cavas de Zonda. I am a physicist and as such I prefer to deal with the physical aspects involved in geophysical research, and the physics of hydrocarbon exploration is mainly related to wave propagation, specifically material waves, such as sound and elastic waves, and electromagnetic waves, such as light propagation and diffusion fields. The applications not only include exploration geophysics but also earthquake seismology and environmental problems. An essential aspect is computational geophysics, which involves the field of numerical analysis, necessary to solve the wave equations with the computer. In summary, the subject was of interest, mainly because most of the methods and applications are innovative, and constitute a transfer of original knowledge. Coming back to the logistical and organizational aspects of the tour, I was contacted by a lady who I know from the beginning of my editor activities, more than ten years ago. She is now in charge of the coordination of the HL and DL programs, a lot of work I would say after experiencing the tour. She is Judy Wall, well known to the readers and authors of Geophysics, because of her past editorial activities. After some discussions with Judy about places to go, I received an itinerary to lecture in La Plata, San Juan, Argentina; Salvador, Rio and Niteroi, Brazil; Córdoba, Argentina; Salvador, again at the SBGF Convention, and Belém, Brazil; Bogotá, Sogamoso, Bucaramanga, and Medellín, Colombia; Caracas and Puerto La Cruz, Venezuela; and Rome, Naples, Pisa, and Trieste, Italy. This is 18 cities and 19 conferences! Almost doubling my expectations. Because I live in Italy and I obviously know Italian, I could not but accept the offer to visit the Italian cities, which, after all, also are very appealing. In summary, the trip sounded very interesting to me. Although I know Argentina and Brazil very well, I was curious and eager to visit.  March 16. Universidad de San Juan, Argentina. Mario Gimenez at my left. The itinerary started in March at the University de La Plata in Argentina. I know the people from the Geophysics department, since we were involved in some projects dealing with pore-pressure prediction and monitoring of CO2 sequestration. The subjects of the talk are particularly known to this group headed by Juan Santos, since they are experts in modeling with the wave equation using FEM methods, mainly poroelasticity and low-frequency electromagnetic methods. I gave the conference ending with technical discussions with the students and a list of advantages of joining the society. The benefits for students who later start working and/or researching in the field of geophysics are numerous. A member can have free access to the SEG Digital Library, which includes Geophysics, The Leading Edge, the SEG Expanded Abstracts, the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Applied Geophysics, fourth edition, publication discounts, and Annual Meeting and training discounts. Moreover, the students may post resumés on SEG’s Web site for employment purposes, and participate in forums and networks. The itinerary continued at the University de San Juan in Argentina. San Juan is a city near of the Andes mountains, located in a fertile valley, with good wines and extraordinary rock formations, which imply an open book of nature for geoscientists, because you can see many formations outcropping in the area. Notably, in the province of San Juan there is the National Park Ischigualasto (a Quechua word, meaning “place where the moon alights”), at 330 km north of the city, which is the largest Triassic period fossil record in the world. Ischigualasto is also a formation containing Late Triassic deposits (230 million years BC), with the oldest known dinosaur remains. It is the only area in the world where the Triassic is represented as a sequence of rock deposits, allowing the study of transition between dinosaurs and ancient mammals.  August 4. Universidade Federal Fluminense, Niterói, Brazil. F. Magrani and C. Silva. This was the first time the San Juan Chapter had hosted a SEG lecturer. They planned a series of promotion activities related to my visit. The next morning I was introduced to the Dean of the Faculty of Sciences, was interviewed by the university television channel, and by the main television channel of the town. Late in the afternoon I was interviewed by a journalist of the magazine Tierra and Mining Press. After the La Plata and the San Juan Student Chapters, I restarted the tour in July at the city of Salvador, in the state of Bahia, Brazil. Every year I teach an advanced course on wave propagation at the Universidade Federal da Bahia, invited by Marco Botelho of the Instituto de Geosciencias. Since we do not have teaching activities at the institute in Trieste, this is one of the opportunities I have to interact with students. It is a rewarding and relaxing activity to teach in Salvador. Brazilian students have a very good background in geophysics, since in the 80’s Petrobras (the national oil company) invited experts from all around the world and established a teaching program related to hydrocarbon exploration. The results of this are very good professors, a competitive oil company worldwide, and the third geophysical convention (hydrocarbon exploration) in importance after the SEG and the EAGE Annual Meetings. The trip continued in Rio de Janeiro, another amazing. The view from the Corcovado mountain is overwhelming. In his book Voyage of the Beagle – A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World Darwin describes the first impact with the landscape in this way: “Every one has heard of the beauty of the scenery near Botofogo. The house in which I lived was seated close beneath the well-known mountain of the Corcovado. It has been remarked, with much truth, that abruptly conical hills are characteristic of the formation which Humboldt designates as gneiss-granite. Nothing can be more striking than the effect of these huge rounded masses of naked rock rising out of the most luxuriant vegetation.”  August 13. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina. Martín Argota and Gysela Reyna. In Rio my first conference took place at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. Marcio de Araujo Martins and Patricia Perez Ferreira, the two students in charge of the Chapter, and Webe Mansur organized this Conference, which was recorded in English to be placed on the SEG Web site. Here, I had a long discussion with people from Petrobras regarding drilling in salt environments. One hour by car from the city center, there is a city called Niterói, where the Universidade Federal Fluminense hosted my second conference in this area, the first time for them. Fabio Guedes Magrani and Cleverson Guizan Silva efficiently organized the event in the auditorium of the university, full of undergraduate and graduate students and most of the professors of the Geosciences Department. I extended my talk another half an hour to explain the basic concepts of wave propagation. After a typical Brazilian buffet, I was interviewed by a journalist from the magazine Geofisica Brasil with the aid of Marco Cetale Santos. Córdoba province is one of the nicest mountain places for vacations, but the first impact was of a very strong dusty wind, high temperature, and dry weather. Desertification is an increasing problem. The climate was anomalous, probably because of anthropic causes or “El Niño” and “La Niña”, and the city and surroundings was suffering from fires, and a drought which lasted more than four months.  August 31. Universidade Federal do Para, Brazil. In front: L. Leite, myself, J. Costa and C. Regis. Martín Argota and Gisela Reyna organized everything at the university, where many students attended, most of them undergraduate and graduate students of the geology and civil-engineering departments. I extended my talk to give details about some physical concepts. The Córdoba experience was very useful since I had the impression that physics, explained with very simple concepts, was well grasped by the geologists. Back to Buenos Aires I met Gabriele Paparo, the scientific attaché of the Italian embassy, to discuss future geophysical meetings in Argentina and the actvities of a new Earth Science’s institute located at the province of Mendoza. OGS is active part in the foundation of ICES, the International center for Earth Sciences, together with Argentinean scientific agencies. This is an attempt to recover the scientific knowledge lost in this field during previous bad administrations that led to the privatization (and disappearance) of the former national oil company YPF. Moreover, our institute presently is organizing the international meeting Geosur 2010, which will take place in Mar del Plata next year. It is good to note that OGS has performed a wide collaboration with Argentinean institutions, in particular with the Instituto Antártico Argentino, related to the campaigns performed in Antarctica with our vessel. I left Buenos Aires to attend the SBGF (geophysical) meeting at Salvador, where I presented the conference again as invited speaker at the technical sessions.  September 2. Universidad Pedagógica y Tecnológica de Colombia. L. Albarracín at my right. The next venue was Belém. Cicero Regis and Jesse Costa organized the event. I was invited by Costa and his family to a small and nice national park at the coast of the Amazon River, very close to the historical city center, where fish from the Amazon river was served at lunch. Late that evening Lourenildo Barbosa Leite invited me to listen Brazilian music, at a popular publike restaurant, where the musicians played Samba and Forró, a typical genre from the North of Brazil. The next day the conference room was so full that we had to move to another larger room. I arrived to Bogotá on 1 September. The next day I went to Sogamoso by taxi; three and a half hours of mountain road. Sogamoso is located 200 km North of Bogotá in the Andean Cordillera with nearly 100 thousand inhabitants, where the university plays an important role, mainly related to the mining industry. There, I was received by Lucía Albarracín Sepulveda from the Universidad Pedagógica y Tecnológica de Colombia. In this venue, I had the maximum number of attendees of my itinerary, approximately 140 persons, most of them undergraduate and graduate students. Many professors came to the venue, also from other faculties of the same university located in nearby cities, such as Tunja, the capital of the province, Boyacá. Since the audience was not composed of geophysicists, I decided to extend my talk in order to explain some concepts in detail. The students were grateful. Then it was back to Bogotá, where I found the time to visit the Candelaria, the city historical center, a neighbourhood at the foot of the hills with many old houses and buildings of Spanish Colonial and Baroque style. The conference, organized by John Cerón, from Ecopetrol and member of the SEG Section Asociación Colombiana de Geólogos y Geofísicos del Petroleo (ACGGP), took place at the Radisson hotel, where I was hosted. The audience was composed mainly of geologists and geophysicists working at Ecopetrol and other companies including some students, an expert audience I would say.  September 5. EAFIT University, Medellín, Colombia. Jose Ignacio Martinez and Carlos Perez Solano at my left. The trip proceeded the next day to the city of Bucaramanga, where Emilio Torres was in charge of the Student Chapter. On arrival, we went to the Instituto Colombiano del Petroleo (ICP). I had a meeting and many questions regarding my publications with researchers of the ICP (mainly graduate students working on modeling and rock physics). I was very satisfied with this meeting; at least my research was being used for practical applications and possible collaboration may arise in the future between OGS and Ecopetrol. I flew in a small plane from Bucaramanga to Medellín, Columbia. Medellín city looked very modern from above. Carlos Perez Solano took me to the EAFIT university and, as in Bucaramanga, I had a meeting with students and researchers of the ICP and Ecopetrol to discuss some aspects of my research activities. After the talk I had many informal questions by about 50 minutes at the buffet, including good wine, offered by the Student Chapter. The flight from Medellín to Caracas, through Bogotá, departed from the International airport, far away from the city. Joan Marie Blanco and Milagrosa Aldana, from the Universidad Simón Bolivar, were waiting me at the airport. Back to hotel I went by taxi to the the Sociedad Venezolana de Ingenieros Geofisicos (SOVG), where I gave the conference hosted by Alejandro Castro and Jesús Sierra. The audience was composed mainly of geologists and geophysicists and students from the Simón Bolivar University. I had the pleasure to know and exchange some words with Miguel Bosch, Associate Editor of Geophysics, who attended the lecture. My last talk in South America was in Puerto La Cruz, Venezuela, at the Caribbean Sea. Two vivacious students, Adrián Rodriguez Herrera and José Antonio Pina, received me at the airport. I stayed at the hotel Maremares, located at the Morro tourist complex with a view to the canals. As in Medellin, an international soccer match was following me (again part of the qualification for the 2010 world cup). This time Venezuela beat Perú and, fortunately, the match started half an hour after my talk. The lecture and further discussion were a success and the room was full. The audience was composed mainly of geologists, geophysicists, and petroleum engineers from PDVSA and private companies, such as Schlumberger and Chevron, and students from the Universidad de Oriente. Back to Europe, I have the Italian tour in November. A last-minute request came from China, since I am going to Beijing in October, invited by the Institute of Geology and Geophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Tsinghua University. One thing leads to another. |
