The “NINTH (NO LONGER) ANNUAL SKEET SHOOT OR: THE LET’S KILL COVID SHOOT” was a great success! Thanks for everyone turning out for the event and we managed to dodge the rain again this year! A big thanks and kudos to Rich Adams and Dale Short for once again organizing this great event.

We have a great talk lined up for our May meeting, which will still be virtual. Distinguished AAPG lecturer William Esch with Exxon-Mobil will present “Reservoir Quality analysis and prediction in diagenetically complex reservoirs: a challenging new frontier” at 12:00 PM Wednesday, May 19, 2021 via Zoom. Please visit our website and register. Thanks to the AAPG Foundation for supporting the AAPG DL Program.

Hopefully we are starting to see light at the end of this long, dark pandemic tunnel! Our April meeting will still be a virtual meeting with Hannah Chambers presenting “Deposition and Diagenesis of the Blossom Sand, Panola County, Texas” at 12:00 PM Wednesday, April 21, 2021 via Zoom. Please visit our website and register. This new geological research on an East Texas reservoir is being conducted by Hannah Chambers at SFA, and she is a scholarship recipient from your Society.

This fall we hope to be back to in-person meetings, but we probably will continue to have a “Zoom” option for those meetings as well. We haven’t worked out exactly how we do that at our current Cascades venue. During this period of virtual meetings, it has been clear that the ability of speakers to speak via Zoom has opened up the possibility for many speakers to participate in our meetings that we would be unable to get, due to the amount of time required to travel to Tyler for an in-person event.

I trust all of you are back to “pandemic normal” after the great freeze. We will make up our delayed February talk tomorrow (3/3/2021) when Robert Loucks and Chris Zahm will speak on “Geologic overview and characterization of the Upper Cretaceous Austin Chalk Trend, onshore Gulf of Mexico”. Another great presentation at GeoGulf 2019 was the excellent “Keynote Presentation” by Gregory Wrightstone with his talk “Unusual and Unprecedented Warming? What do Geologic and Human History Tell Us?”. Whatever your position is on climate change issues, this talk presents a great deal of important data, much of it new, that earth scientists need to be aware off as go forward policies are debated. I am pleased to say that Gregory Wrightstone will be our March 17 speaker and he will present an expanded version of his GeoGulf presentation. We have just received his abstract and we are posting it on our website. Please sign up timely so we can prepare for what should be a great event.