The annual American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) conference and exhibition is next week (April 6-9) in Houston, Texas, and the Virginia Tech Sedimentary Systems Research group will be there in full force.

M.S. candidate Patrick Boyle is giving a talk on his thesis research on Tuesday afternoon at 2:20pm in the ‘Turbidites and Contourites’ session. Pat is nearly ready to defend his thesis (less than a month from now!), and this talk will be his chance to show off the work he’s done to the AAPG community.

• Presentation Title: Investigating Slope-Parallel Processes in Mud-Dominated Depositional Systems Through Seismic Stratigraphic Mapping of Contourite Drifts: Newfoundland Ridge, Offshore Canada
• Day / Time / Location: Tuesday, April 8, 2:20pm — Room 360

Ph.D. candidate Cody Mason is also presenting a poster and, like Neal, has some brand new data to share from recent field work in California. This poster is a chance for Cody to present preliminary ideas about the depositional evolution of the stratigraphic succession he’s been investigating.

• Presentation Title: Architecture, Lithofacies, and Depositional Model for the Ballarat Sequence: A Mid-Pleistocene Fan-Delta Complex, Panamint Valley, California
• Day / Time / Location: Monday, April 7, all day — Exhibition Hall, Booth 16B

Ph.D. candidate Neal Auchter is presenting a poster on his research on the Upper Cretaceous slope deposits of the Tres Pasos Formation in southern Chile. Neal recently returned from six weeks of field work down there and has much to share.

• Presentation Title: Slope Evolution Revealed by Analysis of Sandstone Body Architecture, Tres Pasos Formation at Cerro Mirador, Chile
• Day / Time / Location: Tuesday, April 8, all day — Exhibition Hall

Finally, I will be giving a brief, and hopefully provocative, talk at the SEPM evening research session on Monday evening. If you’ve never attended the SEPM evening sessions, they tend to be more lively and informal than the ‘normal’ technical sessions during the day. In the past these have been quite fun. This year the organizers invited me, Mike Blum (Univ of Kansas), Kyle Straub (Tulane), and Ashley Harris (Chevron) to discuss allogenic and autogenic controls on deep-water stratigraphy.

• Day / Time / Location: Monday, April 7, 7-10pm — Hyatt Regency Houston, Arboretum 4-5 (2nd Floor)

Hope to see you there!