JACK SHARP’S MEINZER AND MIISSOURI YEARS (1974-1982) AND THE ADVENT OF NUMERICAL SEDIMENTARY BASIN MODELING

Numerical sedimentary basin models simulate fluid and heat flow, deposition, erosion, and compaction, hydrocarbon generation and expulsion, and secondary migration. While complicated and often in the realm of petroleum exploration geologists, they are essentially just multiphase groundwater flow and transport models. But they also model deposition, erosion, and compaction and typically require a deforming coordinate system. These models were under development in the late 1970s, but were first reported in the literature in the early 1980s. In the early 1970s, Jack was a student of Pat Domenico at University of Illinois. His Ph.D., completed in 1974 entitled “An Investigation of energy transport in thick sequences of compacting sediments” describes the first model to couple fluid flow and transient heat transport in compacting sediments. Jack immediately earned a professorship at the University of Missouri in 1974 where he remained until 1982. In 1976, Sharp and Domenico earned the GSA Meinzer Award for a paper on his Ph.D topic entitled “Energy transport in thick sequences of compacting sediment” published in the same year in the GSA Bulletin. Along with proprietary model development at oil companies, there were four schools developing numerical sedimentary basin models in the early 1980s: Illinois (Domenico and Sharp and later Bethke), University of South Carolina (Lerche), France (Institut Francais du Petrole (IFP; Durand); and Germany (IES in Julich ; Yukler, Welte). These schools were all influenced by the Meinzer paper and the German models explicitly incorporate its concepts. Sharp published another paper during this period (1978) entitled “Energy and momentum transport model of the Ouachita Basin and its possible impact on the formation of economic mineral deposits” in Economic Geology. This was the first model time someone put the conceptual model of basinal brine-pore water expulsion into a quantitative mathematical form. Jack was a groundbreaker in the sedimentary basin modeling field but it may get overlooked due to all the excellent research he has done on other topics since then.