For the Geophysical Society of Houston (GSH) the Spring Symposium is the premier technical event of the year. The GSH organizes and promotes the event to provide educational and knowledge-sharing opportunities for its members and the larger geophysical community.

So it is kind of important to “get it right.”

Since 2007, the GSH has combined its annual technical venue with the opportunity to honor a Houston-based geophysicist who has made extraordinary contributions to the society and the science. “Were there a geophysical hall of fame, our honorees would all be in it,” said Glenn Bear, GSH first vice president.

But finding a ringer was not enough to guarantee a crowd for the two-day event. The organizers also needed a topic and a robust roster of speakers. And, thanks to a format change that made the event invitation-only to speakers, they needed the best experts in the business.

Not surprisingly, this year the committee hit on the hot topic du jour – unconventionals. From there it was an easy step to honor Peter Duncan, founder and CEO of MicroSeismic Inc. Duncan has helped pioneer the use of microseismic techniques in fracture monitoring and is helping to expand the technology into other areas as well.

With the honoree and topic chosen, it was time to invite the speakers. Phil Schultz, first vice president elect, tapped a colleague at Chevron to suggest the movers and shakers within the microseismic cosmos. “He gave me a good list to work from,” Shultz said. “I pared it down to an ‘A’ list and contacted everyone on that list.”

The result was a two-day program with extremely high-level talks from people who know their stuff. In fact, some of that “stuff” was probably over the heads of traditional geophysicists who have not had much exposure to microseismic. But the audience stayed until the end.

A change to this year’s format was to allow a full hour for each speaker’s presentation, with plenty of time for discussion at the end. Schultz said that many respondents indicated that they learned as much during these discussion periods as they did during the presentations.

Also, the presentations were not intended to be advertisements. I got the impression that, while microseismic is a great technology that works well in many applications, there are still times that it does not work as well as one might like, and there are still many mysteries to be solved.

“Our goal here is to make sure that experts in the field see content that is worth their time and leave with something they didn’t know before,” Bear said. “You will not attract the experts in any given field if you are having an introduction to building velocity models or an introduction to microseismic techniques. The technical level needs to be pretty high.

“Once the experts have decided that this is worth their time, the novices decide they’d better go listen to the crowd of distinguished speakers because the experts have already forgotten more about microseismic than the novices know.”

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