--> Abstract: The Gulf of Mexico as a CASEP (Complex Adaptive System with Emergent Properties): a New Analog for Mobile Substrate Basin Exploration Worldwide, by R. L. Phair; #90933 (1998).

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Abstract: The Gulf of Mexico as a CASEP (Complex Adaptive System with Emergent Properties): a New Analog for Mobile Substrate Basin Exploration Worldwide

Phair, Ronald L. - Texaco E&P, Offshore Region

Recent work by the Sante Fe Institute for Complexity has outlined a powerful new descriptive construct involving natural fractal processes interacting to produce hierarchically organized patterns that replicate themselves across a broad range of nested scales, This construct - known as a CASEP (Complex Adaptive System with Emergent Properties) - is a fundamental natural self-organizing principle that it can be identified in all physical disciplines ranging from cosmology, geomorphology, biological evolution, ecology, embryology, computer networks, and software dynamics.

For the last two years, Texaco has aggressively adopted a CASEP-based, layered framework exploration technique in the deep water Gulf of Mexico (GOM). It exploits a remarkably coherent emergent pattern of hydrocarbon accumulation that formed as a dynamically self-organized outcome of the interaction of inherited tectonic architecture, salt deposition, and eustatically-driven sedimentation-induced mobile substrate reactivation. This recurring non-random pattern consists of a nested set of self-organizing depopods historically called intra-slope basins. These eventually stable sedimentary mosaics formed hierarchically linked sedimentary fairways within a reticulated, episodically-unstable matrix of lineament-bounded, salt-weld-fault fabrics that together formed an organized set of scaled fluid-escape structures representative of a basin-wide, gravity-driven density-inversion history. This three dimensionally-tiled, basin-filling sedimentary mosaic is a complexly- patterned landscape containing mappable plays that harbor scaled occurrences of economically significant hydrocarbon accumulations,

The GOM's geomorphogenic self-organization transcendently links basinal shape, sedimentation, compaction, fluid-flow regimes, and salt-weld-fault fabrics implicitly into related regimes the same way it joins the traditionally separately classified risk attributes of Structure, Reservoir, Charge, and Trap into eigen-domains of coupled probability. We have come to regard the Gulf of Mexico as a global analog of a fundamentally new form of gravitationally active basin.

AAPG Search and Discovery Article #90933©1998 ABGP/AAPG International Conference and Exhibition, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil