As more and more sediment (mostly from the Mississippi and other Gulf Coast rivers) is deposited on the bottom of the Gulf, it crushes the salt. Much of Louisiana, Texas and Arkansas are actually lying on top of the old salt fields. A funny thing about salt is that under enough pressure, salt becomes plastic and starts to move through the sediments to reach equilibrium. The salt is actually moving faster under the Gulf of Mexico than the sea floor is spreading at the boundaries of the tectonic plates.
As the salt moves through the sediment, two things happen: the salt deforms the sediments it moves through, creating "traps" where oil can be caught. It also deforms the sea floor and modifies the way further sediments are deposited, creating pockets of oil and gas.
A major tool used in petroleum exploration is seismic interpretation. A ship tows an array of special microphones called hydrophones and a large air gun. The air gun makes a very loud, sharp bang, so loud that the hydrophones are able to record echoes from rock formations several miles beneath the sea. These echoes are then displayed as a graph called a seismic section showing the ship's track on the X axis and the travel time to each echo on the Y axis. If there are no velocity problems, the travel time is proportional to the depth - but in areas of salt, there are serious velocity problems.
Sound has a much higher velocity through salt than it does through sediment. This causes great distortions in the seismic section. In the past, it was very difficult to search for oil in areas with salt (which includes over half the Gulf of Mexico). Modern computers and the decline in the cost of computing has changed this. The array of computers and other equipment needed to make the calculations to refocus the seismic data would be an interesting story all by itself. Dozens of gigabytes of data are necessary to evaluate just one region surrounding a salt area. In fact, with the two gigabyte file size limit of many UNIX systems, it's necessary to break these logical files into many smaller physical files and concatenate them in the application.
It's worth the trouble. We suspect that there is at least as much if not more oil in the Gulf of Mexico under the salt as above. And the Gulf is only the beginning. There are several other major salt "plays" throughout the world. BHP Petroleum is a major player in sub-salt and deep water petroleum exploration in the Gulf of Mexico and other parts of the world. (BHP Petroleum is a division of the Broken Hill Proprietary Company of Melbourne Australia, which is a giant minerals, copper, steel, and petroleum resources company and the largest industrial company in Australia. We are probably better known in the United States, however, for our Foster's Ale.)
While the real number crunching applications are written in C and C++, a large amount of the data management and preparation is done in Perl. Perl has several advantages for us: it can read arbitrarily large records (up to the limits of swap, which in our case is usually close to two gigabytes), and the pack() and unpack() instructions let us read integer and floating point binary numbers. We use it for dozens of applications.
Without Perl, these applications would have to be written in C, or possibly even Fortran. Many of these are "one-off" programs; it would be very expensive and cause many delays if these programs had to be written with traditional MIS style development cycles. We have a small staff of computer-savvy geoscientists and geoscience-savvy sysadmins who can respond very quickly and produce useful scripts in minutes.
This program that clips seismic amplitudes on a tape or disk file in a particular format called SEG-Y. It demonstrates a few functions you don't see in many Perl programs: pack(), unpack(), sysread(), syswrite(), and eof().
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