Exploration Insights Great Geos ebook | Page 133

Great Geologists | 133
Peter Vail’s overview of Phanerozoic eustasy from AAPG Memoir 26 in 1977.
AAPG ©1977, reprinted by permission of the AAPG whose permission is
required for further use.
data to make it more useful as was interpreting it. The results
started to express themselves in exploration success stories –
the identification of the Balder lowstand fan in the North Sea
for example.
By the 1970s Vail was increasingly involved in outreach
activity and began to deliver a Seismic Stratigraphy School
for AAPG with the lecture notes eventually released as the
seminal AAPG Memoir 26 “Seismic Stratigraphy – Applications
to Hydrocarbon Exploration” in 1977. The integrative and
predictive power of sequence stratigraphy and eustasy now
began to be embraced by the exploration industry at large.
Academia also began to take notice of sequence stratigraphic
concepts and geologists working on outcrops began in
earnest to recognize the sequences and eustatic changes
mentioned in AAPG Memoir 26 and subsequent publications.
The ‘sequence stratigraphy industry’ of the late 20th century
that occupied a significant proportion of geoscience academia
striving to relate particular outcrops to the eustatic models
of Vail and his colleagues has been criticized by some. There
were doubtlessly cases of force-fitting and circular reasoning
from some academics. But Vail always highlighted the need
to judge the evidence in the rocks on its own merits.During
a conference field trip in Europe during the 1980s Vail
was repeatedly asked at every outcrop “is this your late
Valanginian sea-level fall”, “where exactly is the sequence
boundary” or similar. To his credit he replied look at the
rocks and judge the evidence for yourself. In the later
phase of his career he has promoted this wise advice in his
teaching at Rice University and with his numerous academic
collaborations to advance sequence stratigraphic and eustatic
models.
REFERENCES
Vail, P.R. 1992. The evolution of seismic stratigraphy and the
global sea-level curve. In: Dott, R.H. Jr. (ed.) Eustasy: The
Historical Ups and Downs of a Major Geological Concept.
Geological Society of America Memoir, 180, 83-92.
https://archives.aapg.org/explorer/2003/05may/slc_vail.cfm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpz7tFjxTHg
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_
query=%22peter+vail%22+%22mini+geology%22+interview
.