New department head is named in Geology and Geophysics

Sep 28, 2015

Michael Pope is professor of geology and the new department head for Geology and Geophysics.

Michael Pope was born and reared in California were he attended community college in San Diego before earning a bachelor’s degree in Earth and space sciences from UCLA in 1985. He earned an M.S. in geology from the University of Montana in 1989, studying Early Cambrian carbonates in British Columbia and the Northwest Territories, Canada. Mike earned his Ph.D. from Virginia Tech in 1995, working on Ordovician carbonates in Kentucky and Virginia. Pope studied Precambrian carbonates with John Grotzinger during a post-doc at MIT then worked at Mobil. Pope taught at Washington State University before coming to Texas A&M in 2009 where he teaches carbonate and siliciclastic sequence stratigraphy and field camp.

Pope also served as interim director of the Berg-Hughes Center for Petroleum and Sedimentary Systems.

Pope’s research focuses mainly on

  • integrating litho-, chemo- and chronostratigraphy in a regional sequence stratigraphic framework to understand high-frequency and long-term climatic and oceanic processes affecting development of sedimentary successions, especially in carbonate reservoirs
  • using detrital zircon geochronology to understand sediment dispersal and large-scale tectonic processes

Pope and his students are currently working on microbial carbonate reservoirs, slope and toe-of-slope carbonate rocks, carbonate unconventional reservoirs and sediment dispersal of Ordovican quartz arenites.