seg.org - Annual Meeting 2007 news coverage

Thomsen paints upbeat picture of SEG

Sylvie Dale

23 September 2007—Leon Thomsen, 2006-2007 SEG president, was optimistic about the state of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists and its prospects for the future. He delivered his Presidential Address after the Honors & Awards presentations on Sunday afternoon.

Thomsen cited several reasons for his optimism:

Membership exceeded 28 000 during the 2006-2007 fiscal year (see Figure 1).
SEG has members in 130 countries.
There are 183 student sections.
The Society’s financial health is robust.
The backlog of Geophysics articles has been cleared.

SEG leaders have been fiscally cautious in an atmosphere of growth for several years, which has enabled them to make long-range plans for the continued success of the Society. Although this year’s new projects may seem revolutionary, in reality these plans have been developed carefully by many successive committees, Thomsen said.

New ways of serving SEG members have become necessary because of what Thomsen terms the Great Crew Change (Figure 2).

SEG’s members are distributed more widely than ever around the world (Figure 3)—that is, more than half of SEG members live and work outside the United States; we expect that this trend will continue.

“There has never been another time in the history of geophysics when you can see Hubbert’s Peak looming on the horizon as clearly as we have.”

Thomsen thanked his Executive Committee, acknowledging their hard work in continuing the vision started by previous Executive Committees. “In my view, it’s been an extraordinary group of people, but these are extraordinary, unprecedented times. …your Executive Committee has made this year what I consider extraordinary, unprecedented responses to those challenges.”

This poses obvious challenges to SEG in how to serve this far-flung membership, Thomsen said. He termed this SEG Online, SEG on the line, and SEG on the ground—three goals which differ in method but which will all fulfill vision of providing great service for members.

SEG Online

“The SEG Web site is a good one—in fact, it’s built to the highest standards of 1990,” Thomsen joked. “But today is seventeen years later and we came to the conclusion that this Web site is not suitable for our future. So our vision is that a typical geophysicist anywhere in the world should not view that SEG is somewhere in Oklahoma—he should view that SEG is living on his desktop and he is visiting this Web site maybe every day, even, because it’s an indispensable partner in doing his job well. And we’re going to do that with SEG Online.”

To create a foundation which will enable SEG to further serve the global membership, SEG will soon roll out a totally new Web site, part of which is a new look and feel. Perhaps not as noticeable right now is a new infrastructure underlying the site (new equipment, new platforms, and robust software which will help SEG grow). Without this extensive reworking, SEG Online would not be able to accomplish the many projects on SEG members’ wish lists.

SEG leaders also have recruited a new standing committee (SEG Online, chaired by Susie Peebler), hired a new director of Information Technology (Dan DeMellier), and spent over US$2 million on this first phase of the program. This substantial, multi-year investment will enable SEG to extend a host of SEG services to all of its members, regardless of where they reside. “Our vision is that the SEG Web site will become an indispensable tool for all working geophysicists, one that they will use often (for some, even daily) in order to do their jobs better,” Thomsen said.

The new Web site, which will be launched soon, will contain tools that strengthen the community by enabling collaboration among members within corporations, across corporations, across continents, and across oceans.

SEG on the line

Live, online meetings are now available to every SEG committee member. Using this live meeting tool, participants can share voice and documents in real time without incurring travel costs or wasting time traveling. This further reduces barriers to participation for members outside the continental United States and will help the committees to better represent the overall membership.

SEG on the ground

Another major priority is to establish a presence in multiple parts of the world; to this end, SEG sponsored or co-sponsored geophysical meetings in Angola, Australia, Bahrain, Brazil, Canada, Italy, Mexico, Russia, Turkey, and the United States and with other countries on other continents planned for next year. During his term as SEG president, Thomsen traveled to meet with constituencies in Russia, China, Japan, Egypt, the United States, Italy, Norway, France, Holland, Great Britain, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

SEG also has opened the first two SEG Regional Offices, in Beijing and in Perth. more will be added to serve areas of membership concentration or membership growth. These offices will organize local events and will recruit more members. These offices will be planned by the new Global Development Advisory Committee, chaired this year by Dave Monk, and will be implemented by SEG’s new Director of Global Relations, Bastiaan Bouma. The legal requirements associated with operating in these new environments have caused us to create a new corporation, SEG Global, Inc. (whose only member is SEG).

These regional offices will rejuvenate local leadership, leading to locally conceived and executed programs that we cannot yet foresee. However, we already see the emergence of Regional Lecture tours, each featuring a distinguished local geophysicist offering a lecture broadly within his local region. The first of these was by Steve Chang in South and East Asia; the second is by Shiv Dasgupta in the Middle East and Africa.

SEG leaders also created SEAM (SEG Advanced Modeling Project) Corporation to develop synthetic data sets of appropriate complexity to test the new algorithms. The corporation currently is capitalized at well over US$1 million by corporations whose representatives will decide the nature of the model(s) and of the computation. Following an initial period of exclusivity, the results of the modeling will be made available to the entire membership at a nominal cost.

SEG continues to maintain and develop good relations with our sister societies: American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG), Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE), European Association of Geoscientists and Engineers (EAGE), Environmental and Engineering Geophysical Society (EEGS), Society of Petrophysicists and Well Log Analysts (SPWLA), American Geophysical Union (AGU), and the American Geological Institute (AGI). In particular, SEG created an ad hoc Joint Committee on SEG/AAPG Cooperation, with three members from each society; the SEG delegation is headed by SEG Foundation Chairman Gary Servos. We have already entered into new cooperative agreements with regional societies: Eurasian Geophysical Organization (EAGO), Indonesian Association of Geophysicists (HAGI), and the Australian Society of Exploration Geophysicists (ASEG).

The SEG Foundation is in the middle of another year of vigorously expanded activity. Look for exciting announcements from the Foundation in San Antonio. The partnership between SEG and the SEG Foundation has never been stronger.

The SEG Foundation has made strides toward its goal of inspiring geoscientists of tomorrow. To that end, the Foundation has greatly expanded the SEG Scholarship Program (with the material assistance of a large grant from Anadarko), with almost US$500 000 in scholarships and grants awarded in 2007 to students from 60 countries. With the help of Chevron, the Foundation has established the Student Leadership Program, in which outstanding student leaders from all over the world, who have established outstanding local programs in their student chapters, will come to the SEG Annual Meeting, all expenses paid. The first group of outstanding student leaders are at the meeting in San Antonio this week. The SEG Challenge Bowl, in its second year, brings the winners of regional competitions, all expenses paid, from as far away as Dhahran, to the SEG Annual Meeting for the worldwide championship.

To fund these many innovations, SEG has elected this year to strategically invest in them, drawing on the substantial reserves that is has accumulated over many years. To help us SEG establish long-term financial policies to fulfill our mission in a financially responsible way, SEG created the ad hoc Strategic Finance Committee, chaired by past-President Rutt Bridges, with representation from many of the standing committees.

With all of these changes now launched and running, it is clear that your SEG has moved boldly into the 21st century with confidence and resolve. As we move ahead, your active participation will be more important than ever.

Advertise with SEG