The role of seismic advances in reducing exploration risk in the northern Perth Basin
Seismic data from the northern onshore Perth Basin has generally been of poor quality and as a result, many exploration wells have been drilled off structure. Combined with other factors, this has contributed to a lack of consistent exploration effort in the basin over the past 20 years. However, by applying recent advances in seismic technology, data quality is being significantly improved. Reasons for these improvements are given along with supporting examples, providing a comparative summary of seismic methods employed in the basin. Better structural definition has resulted from the improved seismic data and initial drilling results indicate that this is having a positive impact on the success rate.
Since international awareness of a global rush for land has grown from 2008 onward, various databases and reports have attempted to provide an overview of the situation by compiling information on individual land deals. While providing such an overview is challenging owing to the dynamic and untransparent nature of the investments, flawed methods of using and citing data are aggravating that challenge and allowing dissemination of inaccurate information. The consequences are an unnecessarily blurred picture of the land deal situation and thus an inadequate basis for related political decisions or social actions and a misleading starting point for new research projects. In this article we demonstrate some of the flaws in the use of data and their consequences, with examples from fieldwork and literature on Tanzania. The paper illustrates and contributes to the evolving debate on appropriate research methodologies for studying the global land rush.