WMU News

Geosciences awarded exploration software grant

Jan. 15, 2002

KALAMAZOO -- Geophysics technology used for research and teaching at Western Michigan University will remain on the cutting edge, thanks to a $237,475 award from a Houston-based company.

Seismic Micro-Technology has awarded the Department of Geosciences a $237,475 grant to update the company's software. The grant is a continuation of a 1999 award from the company that was used to purchase five commercial client's licenses of Seismic Micro-Technology 's KINGDOM Suite software. The new grant will cover the purchase of five more site licenses as well as a 14 percent maintenance fee for the next three years.

The software is designed to process, display and manipulate large sets of reflection seismology data. Such data can be used to create two-dimensional and three-dimensional renderings of the earth's subsurface.

In addition, WMU geoscience researchers have found that data from a very different source, ground penetrating radar, can be imported into the system and processed equally as well as the seismic data.

One of the main advantages of the software is that it can run under the Windows or NT operating systems on personal computers or workstations instead of the supercomputers often used to process large amounts of seismic data. Software of this type is primarily used by the oil and gas exploration industry.

Media contact: Scott K. Crary, 269 387-8400, scott.crary@wmich.edu


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