Posted on 03/06/2016 8:35:56 PM PST by Utilizer
Must have been an amazing sight.
I, for one, welcome our Old God overlords...
The reasons not to: Unconsolidated material, and a high risk of losing core, running a core barrel with a sleeve designed for unconsolidated material, which is a shorter core barrel, but has a better recovery rate in unconsolidated sediment (or highly fractured rock).
Or they figure the fractured rock will slide along the fracture planes while coring and jam the inner barrel, at which point one of two things happens--
You either continue to your full barrel depth and grind up the core from the point where you jammed the barrel...
... or You stop coring anyway, because the rock will not slide up the inner barrel and that supports the weight you are trying to put on the bit (which can no longer cut the rock below it).
In the first case you think you are coring, but you lost data instead.
In the second, you just aren't going any farther and end up tripping anyway.
I have seen both events in the years I have spent in the patch.
(And yes, I have seen a number of expensive screw-ups happen, too).
muslims?
“asteroid impact 66 million years ago that killed off the dinosaurs...”
So now it’s 66 million years? 10-20+ years ago the talk was that it was only 65 million years ago. A million years isn’t exactly chump change, y’know?
I haven’t missed very many three-guys-in-the-corner grade horror movies over the years, but I hadn’t seen that critter before. Nice one!
“You still get all the core, ideally.”
Oh - duh! (On my part!) I only worked a couple of summers in the oil patch - we never did any coring. The geologist would get grab samples as the mud came back up. I’m guessing we must have been drilling in a field that was pretty well figured out? (This was back in the early 80’s).
For a little while, anyway...saved it for the Finale!
Yig, or Shudde M’ell.
Some companies still do it to find out more about the formation, but even that seems to be as much about the pressures needed to frac the rock as depositional environments and sedimentological data, which were critical in chasing field margins with vertical wells (complete hit or miss), but not as vital with horizontal ones where even less desirable wellbore might be fracced into better layers close by (10-20 ft., vertically).
There is more that can be gleaned from that cylinder of rock than ever, but it just isn't as common.
My first four wells we cut six cores (79-80). My last 20 wells (2015), we cut none, but the (last 20) horizontal wells and the speed with which they were drilled were the stuff of science fiction when I started in the oil patch.
On first read thru- I read still classified-
Made me laugh- classified after 66 mil yrs that some secret.
Thanks I always enjoy this type of article
“is still classified as speculation”
One of the hypocrisies of science, UFO’s are considered paranormal, yet some wild theory like this is considered to be fact by many scientists, along with black holes and global warming.
And the public laughs at UFO’s while sucking up this asteroid theory.
As a little kid, I saw that movie one afternoon while the parents were away.
Gave me nightmares for months.
To this day, anytime there’s new of some scientist drilling for something, I think of *that*.
A tiny piece of frozen monster came up on the drill bit....and then it *grew*.
{{{shudder}}}
Many years later, The largest production casing we had in any of our wells was only 7 inches in diameter. Then I grinned thinking how silly it had been as a kid to find the idea of LGMs (little gray men--hey, it was a B&W TV) climbing up out of the depths of the Earth...
Funny how that stuff sticks with you.
Cthulhu! Yikes.
It was 65 million years ago when we learned about that as kids. Time is ticking. Tough to believe we’re up to 66 million already !
One of those reason is that the dinos were around for millions of years after the impact - I read that somewhere.
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