Happy Holidays! I hope everyone is staying safe in these difficult times. With the advent of "Zoom" meetings, we are offering a great new option for viewing the presentations if you have a scheduling conflict or wish to study the material at a later date. From our website, you can purchase at a very modest cost, Zoom meeting videos for $10 for 30 days after the initial meeting and for $5 thereafter. The link provided allows download of the video to your PC, so you can watch it as often as you wish. Providing this service requires fees to Zoom, so a modest fee is needed by your Society to provide this service to our members. Simply go to easttexasgeo.com/videos on our website.

Halloween is behind us and we find the COVID 19 pandemic is still with us and continues to affect our activities. Your ETGS Board continues to look for educational and social activities for the membership, while keeping the safety of our members as our top priority. To this end, ETGS hosted our popular outdoor event, the annual Golf Tournament in October. This year ETGS offered “BREAKEVEN” pricing and we appreciate the great response. We had 99 golfers participate. Thanks to the generosity of 14 sponsors, the tournament was able to offer a number of awards and some 20 door prizes. A fajita dinner on the back patio followed golf. We are happy to report ETGS came close to breaking even! Thanks again to Nick Pollard for organizing and hosting this event!

We have a great virtual meeting planned for November and you should have received an email invitation. Please plan to attend a virtual "Zoom" meeting on November 18 at 12 noon. We will have a presentation by Kelly Hattori with BEG. She will present an expanded version of her research paper, presented at AAPG, entitled "A new sequence stratigraphic framework for the Early Cretaceous Pettet Formation of East Texas and investigation of controls on facies deposition". Follow the link for Kelly’s bio, abstract and how you can sign up. Your support is greatly appreciated!

As ETGS finishes our summer recess and we begin our fall session, we find the COVID 19 pandemic is still with us and is affecting all our activities. Your ETGS Board is striving to provide educational and social activities for this fall, while keeping the safety of our members as our top priority. To this end, please update your calendars and plan to participate in our activities detailed as follows:

• ETGS has worked with the “Switch Energy Alliance”, under the direction of Dr. Scott Tinker (Director, Bureau of Economic Geology), to offer a streaming viewing of their new documentary “Switch On”. This film follows in the footsteps of the award-winning documentary “Switch” and offers new insights on our most pressing energy policy decisions. We highly recommend this balanced treatment of these issues that are so important to most of our members.