Developments in Management and Analysis of Scanned Whole Sample Thin Section Images

Summary Analysis of rocks remains the ground-truth that underpins all of geoscience. As microscopes are being replaced by high resolution scanners for looking at rock thin sections, the relatively high investment in the new technology will only be justified by a rigorous re-analysis of the purpose of and reasons for the exercise of petrographic data collection. Working with oil company and service company petrographers engaged in petrographic data collection, and those geoscientists using the resultant data within E&P, we have devised workflows for both combining the old (microscope-based) and new (scanner-based) technologies, and for transitioning to a new working environment, which avoid the pitfalls of trying to reproduce extant methods of working instead of re-evaluating the purpose behind the methods.