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Peter Flemings, professor of geoscience at Penn State, will discuss “The Dynamic Flow Regime Beneath the Sea Floor” noon Friday in Van Wickle Hall room 108.
In order to design safe and economic drilling programs, scientists study a combination of stratigraphy (layers of earth) and hydrodynamics (water motion), which is used to predict conditions of the sea floor.
Flemings will focus on conditions such as overpressure, hydrocarbon entrapment, seafloor venting, and slope stability, as well as the geographical characteristics of locations such as the Popeye Genesis minibasin, Gulf of Mexico, and Ursa Basin, south of New Orleans.
In addition to authoring nine publications on this subject, Flemings has participated in five ocean drilling research cruises and is director of the Penn State Geo Fluids Consortium to study fluid flow in basins, chairperson of Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) Engineering Development Panel, and co-director of Petroleum GeoSystems Initiative, a cooperative effort of Penn State and the industry to train the next generation of engineers and geoscientists. He is also co-chief scientist for the IODP expedition in the Gulf of Mexico and associate editor for GeoFluids and Basin Research.