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Letters
Topic: Industry is Not the Enemy
3 Sept. 2009
Dear GSA Today editor,
Geoscientists working in the petroleum (and other) industries produce an awful lot of good science. Those companies collect geophysical, well-log, and other data of a high quality that most of us can only dream about. A great deal of what we know about sediment dynamics, stratigraphic evolution, submarine channel dynamics, salt tectonics, and many other processes comes from data collected by petroleum companies and analyzed by their geoscientists. Much of that data is, of course, initially proprietary, but eventually it reaches the larger geoscience community once exploration in those areas is no longer deemed profitable. When the research gets published and/or presented publicly, we all benefit from new knowledge.
Amy Draut, U.S. Geological Survey