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StrataData Staff and Associates

John Athersuch - Biostratigrapher and Managing Director
Paul Britton - Geological Software Engineer and Director
Rosa Britton - Designer and Programmer, Geological Software
Antoine Wonders - Consultant Biostratigrapher
David Smith - Consultant Stratigrapher

John Athersuch BSc, PhD, C Geol, FGS

John has spent 28 years working in the petroleum industry on both research and operational aspects of biostratigraphy. His experience covers a wide range of microfossil groups of all ages and a good working knowledge of allied exploration disciplines. He has held a number of managerial posts and was responsible for the introduction, development and documentation of BP's biostratigraphic computing systems.

John's main biostratigraphic projects have included studies on non-marine ostracods and charophytes from China, S.America, W.Africa and Europe, Tertiary and Mesozoic foraminifera and algae in Middle East and Pakistan, Tertiary and Mesozoic marine ostracods from N.Africa, Middle East, S.America and Europe. He has carried out major stratigraphic studies on Canadian Arctic, offshore Ireland, Chinese offshore and onshore basins, Peru & Ecuador, Abu Dhabi, the Tertiary of Sirte Basin, Libya and the Jurassic and Carboniferous of NW Europe. In addition, John has experience of well-site operations and overseas fieldwork in Europe, China, FSU, N.Africa and Greenland.

John has developed an international reputation through a large number of publications on a wide range of topics including ostracod and foraminiferal taxonomy and biostratigraphy, graphic correlation, expert systems and computing applications.

John shares in the development of StrataBugs and is responsible for marketing the software and StrataData's services. He also runs StrataBugs user training courses and manages most of the company's stratigraphic projects.

In 2006 John was appointed Research Associate in the Oxford University Centre for the Environment.

john@


Paul Britton BSc

Paul has been working since 1979 on data processing and computer applications development in the oil industry. He has been responsible for the overall design and implementation of StrataBugs on both PC and Unix platforms, and provides end user and StrataBugs system administrator support and training.

Prior to forming StrataData, he was primarily responsible for the development, enhancement and maintenance of BUGS, the BP global biostratigraphy system.

Paul currently works in Java and C++ on the Windows platform. He has experience in database design with ORACLE and Access, and a wide experience of other operating system environments and languages.

Paul has a degree in geology and experience in marine seismic survey navigation data processing. He has also published on biostratigraphic database design and implementation.

paul@

Rosa Britton Bsc

Rosa has been working on the next generation of StrataBugs, focusing on GUI design and workflow. She has skills in programming in Java and the Adobe Creative Suite, amongst others. She will be assisting in the roll-out, support and documentation of StrataBugs Version 2.


Antoine A. H. Wonders MSc, PhD

As a university lecturer, Toine acquired valuable experience as a field geology tutor and as a teacher in various palaeontological subjects. He initiated research in Milankovitch cyclicity in the geological record in Utrecht, and wrote his Ph.D thesis on Cretaceous planktonic foraminifera of the western Mediterranean region.

As a biostratigrapher with British Petroleum, Toine worked on the foraminiferal biostratigraphy of wells in the North Sea, several other European basins, North Africa, equatorial Africa, Alaska, Newfoundland, Brazil, SE Asia and Australia. Review studies and regional geological studies included the western Mediterranean, Papua New Guinea, Grand Banks, Alaska, the Adriatic Sea, and the Java Sea basin. His work focused increasingly on Australia and SE Asia, and after participation in ODP Leg 122 on the Exmouth Plateau, offshore Western Australia, he joined exploration groups in Indonesia and Vietnam, applying biostratigraphic data in seismic and sequence stratigraphy.

In P.T. Robertson Utama Indonesia, he coordinated all biostratigraphic disciplines and projects, covering most SE Asian countries. He specialised in carbonate biofacies analysis and larger foraminiferal biostratigraphy in the entire Indo-pacific region.

Now an independent consultant, Toine has continued his work on SE Asian biostratigraphy, mainly on projects in India, The Philippines, Indonesia and the SE China margin and Taiwan, but has also became involved in major stratigraphic projects on the Niger Delta and in Central European (Czech and Romanian) basins and Brazilian Atlantic margin basins.

A relatively new area of expertise is the quantitative analysis and high resolution biostratigraphy of mainly Late Quaternary microfaunas from shallow cores in deep Atlantic and Mediterranean basins, for the benefit of geohazard risk assessment in deep water offshore engineering projects.

antoine@


David Smith PhD, FGS

David has worked in a wide range of stratigraphic disciplines within the oil industry since 1981. Together with earlier work in the academic world, this has resulted in over 50 publications, gaining David an international profile in stratigraphic research and applications.

Starting with BP in 1981 as an operational palynologist, David later worked on global plate tectonic and paleogeographic reconstructions with emphasis on their predictive value in petroleum exploration. He led the team responsible for this work, conducting or overseeing research and technical service projects on the Arctic, Caribbean, Southeast Asia, South Atlantic, Middle East as well as the production of global paleogeographic and paleoclimatic atlases. Collaborative work with Cambridge University led to the publication of Harland et al (1990), one of the standard references on the Geological Time Scale.

For two years, David then led a small team that pioneered the investigation of climatically-forced cyclicity in stratigraphy. The team demonstrated the application of cyclostratigraphy (the Milankovitch hypothesis) to wireline log data, and showed that very high resolution correlation was possible, with the additional possibility of very accurate time-calibration of stratigraphic sections in particularly favourable cases. Publications on this work included two international symposia dedicated to cyclostratigraphy, organised and edited/co-edited by David. He also devoted time to an investigation of the newly emerging field of chaos theory, looking at its relevance to our understanding of the complex dynamic systems that have generated the stratigraphic record.

With Petroconsulants (UK) Ltd, David built and led a team of geologists that generated a series of studies on over 200 of the world's sedimentary basins, looking at their stratigraphy, petroleum systems, exploration history and development. David also edited the company's reports covering E & P activity in NW Europe.

David's enthusiasm for unconventional approaches to stratigraphy, together with his earlier background in mathematics and the physical sciences, places him in a strong position to act as StrataData's coordinator for all our cyclostratigraphic work, especially in relation to the CycloLog software package for which we are the sole UK agent.

david@


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