What's New

• New CBTH Newsletter - February 2018 edition (PDF)


• Congrats to CBTH students Lucia Torrado and Andrew Steier for their leadership of the AAPG Wildcatters student group at UH that won the top AAPG student group award for the USA at the AAPG Salt Lake City meeting. Click here for more information.


• Congrats to Jack Kenning for his fourth place poster award at the student poster session at the AAPG meeting in Salt Lake City for his presentation on the Mexican Ridges in the western Gulf of Mexico. Click here for more information.


• Congrats to former CBTH student Kyle Reuber (PhD, 2017) for his AAPG Jules Braunstein Memorial best poster award for the 2017 Annual Meeting. Click here for more information.


• Congrats to Paul Mann for the Robert H. Dott, Sr., Memorial best publication award shared with his co-editor, Claudio Bartolini (Repsol) for AAPG Memoir 108 on the petroleum geology of the Colombian margin. Click here for more information.


• Congrats to Matt Copley for completing his MS at Colorado School of Mines and his new job at Anadarko. Matt worked with CBTH as an undergrad at UH for 2015-16.


• Congratulations to first-year, CBTH PhD student Jack Kenning (right), who won the 1st Place Oral Presentation award (session 1) at the April 27, 2018, UH Student Research Day and to senior, CBTH, undergraduate student, Omar Zavala (left), who placed third in the undergraduate student poster competition. CBTH PhD students Lucia Torrado and Jack Kenning also received scholarships for Outstanding Graduate Work in Geology at the event.
Click here to see their titles and a list of all EAS presentations at Student Research Day.




• Dr. Paul Mann presented a talk on April 25, 2018, to the Houston Geological Society General Luncheon meeting on hydrocarbon prospectivity of conjugate rifted margins in the Gulf of Mexico and circum-Atlantic. Click here for a link to the talk summary published in the HGS Bulletin.


• Dr. Paul Mann presented two talks at the 1st Meeting on the Lithosphere of the Island of Hispaniola (1ER ENCUENTRO SOBRE LA LITÓSFERA DE LA ISLA DE LA ESPAÑOLA) on March 1-3 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.Click here for more information.


• Congratulations to CBTH PhD student Pin Lin, who won the 2nd Place Poster Award at 2017 the Gulf Coast Association of Geological Societies (GCAGS) Annual Meeting. Click here to read more.


• Dr. Paul Mann was recently featured on KHOU TV to discuss tsunamis. Click here and here for more information.


• The AAPG Hedberg Conference on Geology of Middle America - The Gulf of Mexico, Yucatan, Caribbean, Grenada and Tobago basins, and their Margins - will be held on July 2-5,2018 in Siguenza, Spain. The event is covened by Jorge Comet, CEPSA, Keith James, Consultant, and Jose Luis Granja Bruna, Univ. Madrid. For more information, click here.


• Kyle Reuber (PhD, May, 2017) received the 2018 Jules Braunstein Memorial Award from the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) for a poster he co-authored at the 2017 AAPG annual meeting in Houston. Click here to read more. Kyle also won the Top 10 Oral Presentation Award at the 2017 AAPG Annual Convention earlier in 2017.


• Paul Mann received the 2018 Robert H. Dott, Sr. Memorial Award from the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) for a volume he co-edited with Dr. Claudio Bartolini. Click here to read more.


• The CBTH Project presented 5 presentations at the Fall AGU meeting in New Orleans on December 11-15, 2017. For a list of CBTH presentations at the meeting, click here. For a full list of all 72 UH EAS posters and talks at the AGU meeting, click here.


• CBTH PhD students Shenelle Gomez and Lucia Torrado recently presented at the UH EAS-HGS Sheriff Lecture on Nov. 27, 2017. Click on their names to view videos of Shenelle and Lucia explaining their posters to AAPG President Charles Sternbach.




• CBTH graduate students Pin Lin, Jack Kenning, Beatriz Serrano-Suarez, and Andrew Steier will be presenting at the AAPG Annual Convention in Salt Lake City, Utah on May 20-23, 2018. Click here for details on presentations and the CBTH sponsor luncheon at AAPG.




• For the second year in a row, the UiS program in Norway - led by Drs. Alejandro Escalona and Nestor Cardozo - was ranked number one in teaching quality at the University of Stavanger and was voted the best graduate program in Norway in a “student barometer survey”. Click here for more information.


• Congrats to Claudio Bartolini and Paul Mann for winning the Robert H. Dott, Sr., Memorial Award for their jointly-edited publication, "Petroleum Geology and Potential of the Colombian Caribbean Margin" (Memoir 108) that was published in 2015. Their award will be presented at the AAPG ACE Conference opening ceremony on Sunday, May 20, 2018, in Salt Lake City, Utah. The volume contained the papers of several now graduated CBTH-UH students including Rocio Bernal (PhD, 2015), Javier Sanchez (PhD, 2015), Luis Carlos Carvajal (PhD, 2017), and Joan Blanco (PhD, 2017), and CBTH-UT Austin student (Henry Campos, MS, 2011).



• The CBTH project hosted its annual sponsors meeting on Friday, October 6. For more information, including the schedule, photos, and more, click here.


• CBTH students and researchers will present at the upcoming 2017 GCAGS Meeting in San Antonio. Click here to view a list of presentations.


• Congrats to Lisa Watson for completing her PhD dissertation at the University of Utrecht, titled, "Spatial-based assessment at continental to global scale: Case studies in petroleum exploration and ecosystem services." Lisa started working with the CBTH project in 2005 as an sophomore geology major at the University of Texas. Following her graduation she moved to Norway in 2009 where she continued working with the CBTH project at the Univ of Stavanger. Lisa previously completed her MS at the University of Utrecht in 2011. She is now an associate professor in GIS studies at the University of Stavanger and continues to work with the CBTH project and attend the yearend meetings at the University of Houston.


• Two articles involving the CBTH Project will be featured in the June 2017 Issue of AAPG Explorer. The first, available here, concerns CBTH PhD Student Lucia Torrado's recent 1st place win at the AAPG Student Poster Competition, while the second, available here, concerns the UH IBA Team's recent win in the international competition at the AAPG Annual Convention & Exhibiton.

CBTH Proposal and Product Information

Please feel free to browse our data using a sample version of our Geomapper application (full version available to sponsors), a copy of our new proposal (.pdf), our project flyer(.pdf), and our Contributions List of CBTH publications, theses, and presentations.

The CBTH proposed study area is shown below. This area includes the oil-rich areas of the Mexican and US sectors of the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean, and northern South America, as well as the equatorial, conjugate margins of Guyana, Suriname, French Guyana, Brazil along with countries in western and eastern Africa.

click map to enlarge

The CBTH study area. Numbers correspond to Phase IV, Year 3 student study areas: 1) M. Kouassi, BS UH, Detrital zircon compilation 2) M. Almatrood, BS UH, GOM well subsidence phases 3) M. Bugti, PhD UH, NW GOM structure, stratigraphy 4) D. Lankford-Bravo, BS UH, Mexican Ridges-Perdido structure 5) R. Ajala, BS UH, Gravity modeling Niger, Mississippi deltas 6) P. Lin, PhD UH, SE GOM basement, structure, stratigraphy 7) A. Gomez, PhD UH, Mexican Ridges-Perdido structure, stratigraphy 8) A. Steier, MS UH, Norphlet reservoirs, N. Yucatan, GOM 9) E. Stibbe, BS UH, Eastern USA-NW Africa conjugate reconstructions 10) A. Escalona, Co-P.I., UiS, Jamaica seeps 11) L.C. Carvajal, PhD, UH, Basin modeling, Colombian basin 12) L. Torrado, PhD, UH, Amazon cone structure, stratigraphy 13) S. Leslie, PhD, UH, Structure, basin modeling, South Caribbean deformed belt 14) A. Escalona, Co-P.I., UiS, Andes flexure modelling 15) J. Blanco, PhD, UH, Structure NW offshore Venezuela 16) S. Martinez, BS, UH, Tectonic geomorphology, Puerto Rico 17) S. Gomez, PhD, UH, Barbados prism structure, stratigraphy 18) O. Zavala, BS, UH, Demerara-NW Africa conjugate reconstructions 19) P. Carr, BS, UH, Compilation of OAE events in well data, NE South America 20) E. Lunn, PhD, UH, Ceara-Barreirinhas basins structure, stratigraphy 21) L. Zhang, BS, UH, Fission track constraints on SE Brazil margin 22) P. Loureiro, PhD UH, Santos-Campos gravity, structure, stratigraphy 23) K. Reuber, PhD, UH, South Atlantic volcanic conjugate margins 24) B. Serrano-Suarez, PhD, NW Africa gravity, structure, stratigraphy 25) J. Kenning, PhD, Namibia stratigraphy, basin modeling 26) M. Copley, BS, Mozambique basin gravity, structure

Goals of the CBTH Project

The CBTH Project seeks to create a GIS-based digital and atlas synthesis of available seismic and well data to define the regional hydrocarbon potential of a vast region affected by the Mesozoic breakup of Pangea (shown in upper inset of map of the study area below). This project, which has been operating since September 1, 2005, includes: 1) known hydrocarbon basins of onshore and the lesser known offshore basins of the Caribbean and northern South America (Venezuela, Colombia, Trinidad, Suriname, Guyana, Northern Brazil); 2) the US and Mexico sectors of the Gulf of Mexico; 3) and the rifted-passive margins of the Central in eastern North America and western Europe, and the South Atlantic in South America and west Africa. Our main objectives are to compile all the available digital seismic and published data in a GIS database to provide an integrated geologic synthesis of tectonosequences, depositional systems, major structures, petroleum geology, paleogeographic maps, and quantitative plate reconstructions for a better understanding of the hydrocarbon systems in the region. Our largest concentration of data and current studies are in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico but we have several recently completed and ongoing projects in Brazil and west Africa.

AAPG Explorer Articles on CBTH Research

The CBTH Project was the subject of an article in the October 2012 issue of AAPG Explorer. Click here to read.

CBTH PhD student Lucia Torrado was the subject of an article in the June 2017, issue of AAPG Explorer. Click here to read.

Paul Mann and CBTH MS students Eric Lunn and Andrew Steier were the subject of an article in the June 2017, issue of AAPG Explorer. Click here to read. Click here to read.

CBTH Calendar of Events

• CBTH Geomapper is now back online! The application is accessible through the Sponsor Login page for participating sponsors.