CSM graduate Environmental Department students with Mt. Sopris employee, Lia Martinez.
Mount Sopris Instruments always pursues opportunities to give back to our geophysics community! To further this goal, geophysicist Lia Martinez volunteered to help teach a field class of graduate environmental students from the Colorado School of Mines (CSM) this past September. Lia is a past graduate of CSM in 2007 from the Geophysics Department, so teaching this class was ideal community outreach. The field methods course is taught by Dr. Kamini Singha, a long time owner of Mount Sopris equipment.
Dr. Singha teaches her students to use natural gamma, temperature and fluid conductivity, and optical televiewer tools. Lia Martinez was also able to bring the newest acoustic televiewer, the QL40-ABI-2G. The CSM campus is located near a series of hard rock boreholes along the foothills west of Golden, Colorado. The boreholes are open, water filled, and generally 35 meters in depth. Throughout the day, Dr. Singha, Lia, and the students collected data and discussed borehole logging techniques beginning with basic applications and moving into more advanced topics, such as televiewer centralization and how to set the acoustic echo window time.
Lia Martinez teaching students in the field.
The collected data will next be processed and analyzed using WellCAD software to answer questions about the local geology, fracture density and orientation, water quality, and groundwater flow patterns. Mount Sopris partner company, ALT, has generously donated 20 licenses for use in this class. In the coming weeks, Lia will return to CSM to help teach the new Image & Structure Interpretation (ISI) Workspace within WellCAD. This work will give the students insight and experience into how borehole logging techniques can be applied to professional environmental projects they may encounter in the future.
CSM students looking to zero the tool. They used three sets of eyes for better accuracy!
