Guns & Roses, or: 3D GIS anyone?

The Guns part is the colorful history associated with the Teapot Dome. A remote Wyoming oilfield once a sleepy Naval Petroleum Reserve, the Teapot Dome Scandal was, however, the biggest to rock Washington DC until Watergate... or the oil industry until the Enron collapse! Read this introduction to a book excerpt: Marines Invade Wyoming - From the Halls of Motazuma to the Oil Fields of Teapot Dome, for cape-and-sword intrigue from ranchers and oil barons to US senators and the White House...

Its current incarnation is the Rocky Mountain Oilfield Testing Center (on LinkedIn): RMOTC sounds like "remote-see" for short (its location is remote too!). Tom Anderson's early GIS center released a 3D petroleum GIS dataset at the 2005 PNEC conference. That set of 4 DVDs, which have been used as demo data sets by a number of petroleum software vendors, and as web demos by Esri and others. Always on the hunt for good 3D GIS datasets, I used Esri's new layer-packaging to post it on ArcGIS Online, As Is and with the same Terms of Use. Six group layers are thus called: Teapot Dome Six Pack: No ArcGIS? No worries! Buy the home-use version for a 'bill' or $100.

topography, surface geology and quadrangles

subsurface structure, surface facilities and wells
click image to enlarge

The Roses part? Will such a dataset make anyone with a little patience and imagination smell like a rose pushing Esri into 3D space? I started to upgrade my Geosciences class to grid / contouring and simple reservoir depletion modeling - to show what can be done in GIS out-of-the-box, not to compete with full interpretive suites - stay tuned as this will develop...

At almost two daily downloads since its posting two years ago, it's my most popular on  Slideshare. Comparing that to 50 hits daily average over the same period for this blog would be apples to oranges, or roses, wouldn't it?