UH Undergraduate Geology Major Participates in ExxonMobil Guadalupe Field School
Activity Held in West Texas and New Mexico, March 1-8

Each year, ExxonMobil organizes a field trip for the top 10 percent of the graduating undergraduate, master’s and Ph.D. students that they have interviewed for jobs during the previous fall interview period.  The trip is taught by the company’s top experts and exposes the students to modern methods of petroleum exploration. 

Andrea Meado, a December 2014 magna cum laude B.S. graduate from the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, was the one of 26 students from top geoscience programs who participated. Other students attended from Rice University, Colorado School of Mines, Texas A&M University, Louisiana State University, University of Alberta, University of Wisconsin, and University of Colorado, Boulder.

The group of students and ExxonMobil instructors spent one week visiting classic field localities in the Permian basin of west Texas and New Mexico where they learned about hydrocarbon play elements and how these elements are controlled by the principles of sequence stratigraphy. The group was divided into teams of four students who worked together in the field and gave a group presentation on their interpretation of hydrocarbon play elements in the area at the end of the course. 

Meado completed her senior honors thesis on trace element abundances of abyssal peridotite with her advisors Drs. Wendy Nelson and Jonathan Snow. She has been accepted to Colorado School of Mines, University of California, Santa Barbara, and Southern Illinois University for geology graduate school in fall 2015. She plans to study either petroleum geology or geohazards.

Three other UH graduate students—Yuribia Munoz, Crystal Saadeh, and Nick Bartschi—have been selected for the same field course in the Guadalupe Mountains that will be repeated on April 19-26. Yuribia Munoz is working with Dr. Julia Wellner on a study of Antarctic fjords, and Saadeh and Bartschi are both working with Dr. Joel Saylor.  In addition, an undergraduate geology and geophysics honors student, Daniel Burton, completed an ExxonMobil geophysics shortcourse held recently in Houston.