Part of my job is to understand the depositional environment of the potential prospect. This involves me to go into a core section taken from a close by well which sands I can correlate to the sands of the potential prospect (that’s as rough as I can explain it without going into too technical).
Okay so observation first, it looks like the section is all coarse grained materials with very nice laminaton. Two obvious things that I can observe is the red sands (ignore the core plug) and the nice burrow that little a little critter has made. Red sands indicate an oxidizing environment and if you notice, the little burrow was initially in the oxidized red sand package but surrounding the burrow the sands changes colour. Basically this is due to the nature of the organic material that the little critter leaves and instead of oxidising, it’s reducing hence the change in color.
Taking all of this into account (which is incomplete, I need to observe the lamination but I’m a damn petrologist not a sedimentologist so I’m still learning). I would interpret this as a shoreface environment, maybe upper shoreface. That’s just what I think atleast. This whole thought process is very nice and it was introduced to me from a german sedimentologist who was arguing with an australian sedimentologist on how to coach this fresh graduate.
Until then,
Exploration Cycles 