From pathology to geosciences

At the evening dinner of the DIGEX 2023 conference, Robert Williams, Senior Geologist at the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate (NPD), was given the Digital Frontrunner Prize.

Robert Williams’ willingness to think outside the box and venture into unfamiliar territory demonstrates his interdisciplinary mindset and capacity to transfer knowledge across different fields.

His presentation of the technology and knowledge is exemplary, as it effectively communicates complex concepts in a way that most professional groups can understand and appreciate.

Earlier this year, NPD announced that more than 30 000 digital palynological slides from 284 released wells have so far been made available on the Norwegian National Data Repository for Petroleum Data DISKOS.

To understand why 57 terabytes’ (and counting) worth of pictures of microfossils matter to the petroleum industry, we must first understand what microfossils can tell us.

The layers upon layers of sediments on the Norwegian continental shelf (NCS) are packed with the remains of microorganisms that lived millions of years ago.

Resistant to almost anything diagenesis can throw at them, fossil microplankton, pollen, and spores are sometimes more abundant and better preserved than their descendants deposited on the seabed today.

The microfossils’ abundance in the sedimentary record and their sensitivity to changes in their environment, make them excellent for determining a sediment’s age of deposition and its environment of deposition.

Microfossils are thus a major part of the biostratigraphic analysis in petroleum exploration.

It was Williams that first came up with the idea that the glass slides should be digitized. The reasons: Greatly improving the availability of the palynological data, making sure they wouldn’t get destroyed or lost during shipment, and making them available for future machine learning analysis.

He was prompted to consider which other professional groups are frontrunners in recognizing and interpreting images. In 2018, Williams found his way to a congress within medicine (digital pathology).

The pathologists were improving their diagnoses of diseased tissue by using digital slide analysis and machine learning. Williams quickly realized that this way of working was easily transferable to the field of palynology.

He reached out to experts in the field to explore whether their methods could be applied to his images and help him diagnose and interpret them more efficiently.

The NPD digitalization project Avatara-p was born. It is the world’s first public archive of digital palynological preparations that shed light on Norway’s geological, geographical, and environmental history.

The project is still ongoing, and every week, new digital palynological slides are added to the DISKOS database, helping its members to better correlate and understand what kind of sediments they are dealing with in their wells and prospects.

In this article on GEO ExPro, Williams tells the story of how scanning technology initially applied to aerospace and pathology has now made its way to geosciences.