What Kevin Bohacs, this year’s Sidney Powers Memorial Award recipient, loves most about the world around him is not when it makes sense, not when it’s easily explicable – it’s when the world teases him with its true intentions.
“In the beauty and wonder of nature, order and chaos are two sides of one coin; that there is just enough order to provide predictability – ripples and dunes, parasequences, lake-basin types, seasonal weather, and just enough chaos to obscure the details – dry holes, breached traps, cold spells, tropical cyclones …” he said.
To put it another way: “He listens to the rocks,” said Quinn R. Passey, former petrophysicist for ExxonMobil.
Bohacs, who now operates KMBohacs GEOconsulting, has been listening for more than five decades. He has worked on six continents and 42 countries – and even while working, experimenting and trying to make sense of all those projects in all those places – he still loves the mystery.
All of it.
“That the intricate dance of wind, water and waves, the nonlinear interaction of two volumes of turbulent fluids on a rotating sphere unequally heated by the sun, can produce order at the scale of bedforms, seasons, depositional sequences and orbital cycles,” he said.
Bohacs has written more than 100 scientific contributions on the stratigraphy and sedimentology of mudstones, hydrocarbon source and reservoir rocks, and continental depositional systems (lakes, fluvial-floodplain systems, paleosols, coals and paleoichnology, including lake strata on Mars), co-authored AAPG’s best-selling “Field Safety in Uncontrolled Environments,” two SEPM “Concepts in Sedimentology and Paleontology” texts, and co-edited AAPG Memoirs 95 and 126 (and co-authored 15 of its 16 chapters). His publications have been cited more than 8,000 times and he is an active reviewer for AAPG Bulletin, Journal of Sedimentary Research, Sedimentology, GSA Bulletin and other journals.
He also can haul gumbo with the best of them.
More on that later.
Career Highlights (To Name Just a Few)
Bohacs, who once said, “There are no boring rocks, only boring geologists,” is as nonplussed about his winning of the Powers medal as he is overwhelmed by the company he now keeps.
“With all due respect to the Awards Committee, when I look at the list of Powers awardees, starting with Wallace Pratt, I do indeed wonder what I am doing on that list,” he said.
He might be the only one, though.
The late Stephen C. Ruppel, a senior research scientist at the Bureau of Economic Geology, said of Bohacs that he is not only the smartest guy in most rooms, but also the most approachable. Listening to a Bohacs presentation, Ruppel said is “like having a great meal at a five-star restaurant.”
Bohacs is a recognized leader in the development of comprehensive integrated geological-geochemical models for hydrocarbon source rocks and lake depositional systems. He applied seismic mapping of source rocks in marine environments and developed industry-standard models for sequence-stratigraphic analysis of hydrocarbon-system potential of marine mudstones, coals and lake systems, including exploring in the pre-salt plays in the South Atlantic and other rift-related plays worldwide – all of which were used to help find hydrocarbons on Earth as well as evaluating multi-billion-year-old lake deposits in Gale Crater, Mars observed by the NASA Curiosity Rover.
He is best known, perhaps, for his seminal work, along with Steve Oliveri, co-authoring the AAPG “Geoscience Field Activity Safety Manual,” which is among the top ten AAPG best-sellers.
“Our Field Safety process, and the book that documented it, was the result of an intensive three-month task force of corporate experts in health and safety, medical and occupational health, and field research, field workers with extensive experience in field teaching and expeditions,” he explained.
The work was done through the authors’ experience in outdoor education through Scouting, the American Red Cross, the National Outdoor Leadership School and other such organizations. The goal was to streamline and rationalize field activity preparations and executions, to scale such efforts to the actual and to document risks faced by each.
“The other goal was that I personally had to use this process many times a year, so we wanted something practical and effective,” Bohacs said.
Specifically, he said one design criterion in compiling the manual was to enter each bit of information about the field activity or participant only once – and if that information was needed elsewhere, to have it in the exact same format.
Thinking back upon his career – the books, articles, exploration and volunteering, Bohacs said it all seemed to progress smoothly, especially for something not planned.
“I mean, I was just exploring my curiosity, looking at rocks and trying to devise more effective, efficient, safe and environmentally sound ways of finding and producing hydrocarbons to help relieve energy poverty … and here I am, 52 years later,” he related.
But you stay at a pursuit long enough, as he has, you have trouble remembering it all.
“Sometimes even I forget the shear breadth and depths of the topics I have been blessed to study (in our pursuit of affordable energy) and, perhaps, contribute a bit to advancing our understanding, from the molecular geochemistry of deep-sea sediments to the sequence stratigraphy of lake strata on Mars, applying microbiology, palaeoichnology, isotopic distillation and nonlinear systems dynamics concepts to environments from ocean basin floors, through slopes, shelves, shorelines, swamps, estuaries, deltas, rivers, lakes and aeolian dunes – all enabled by the access to data and persistent support over many years supplied by Exxon and ExxonMobil,” said Bohacs.
That’s what he loves about geology.
“You get to apply all the sciences, and a goodly dose of engineering, to studying our mother, Earth,” he said.
A Citizen of Earth
Bohacs, a serious scientist, is also a serious humanitarian.
“I have found that volunteering provides a way for me to pass along, in some small way, all the blessings I have been given,” he said.
Bohacs has been a volunteer firefighter, emergency paramedic and disaster services responder with the American Red Cross, serving in many roles, teaching courses in first aid, CPR and Emergency Medical Response. He has served as an assistant scoutmaster and scoutmaster of Troop 113 in Alief, Texas, since 1981, including being a geology instructor at Philmont Boy Scout Ranch.
He said he sees his volunteer work as his duty, calling it a rewarding byproduct of sharing in victims’ experiences and helping them get back on their feet, wherever they and their feet happen to be, is deeply satisfying.
“It is much deeper than almost anything else I have ever done,” said Bohacs. “Not to mention running mass-care shelters in the Astrodome and Houston Convention Center, escorting various Texas governors and FEMA administrators around disaster-relief sites, and carrying 24 dozen eggs on the back of a snowmobile in a blizzard to a feeding site and, the most … interesting situations it puts one into: hauling 20 gallons of fresh hot gumbo to a shelter in an airboat up the San Jacinto River.”
And while he helps scouts locally, internationally he helps something much bigger, which he described as, “Helping to provide safe, reliable and affordable energy to lift people out of energy poverty and provide opportunities for human flourishing in an effective, efficient and environmentally sound manner.”
Included in that, he said, is the reward of “finding that nothing you learn ever goes to waste.”
“That’s something I emphasize to students – that’s there is something for everybody in geology,” he added.
But he reminds them that the world of the geosciences is a small one.
“Geology is a rather small profession, that you will probably interact with your classmates for the rest of your life, and therefore it is really important to be nice,” he said.
Being an Honest Broker
For a man who is getting the highest scientific honor from AAPG, he has some words of caution for those both in the business and those who think they have the industry pigeonholed.
“It seems to me that science is not a Big Book of Answers, but a self-correcting method for seeking to understand the physical world that relies on reproducible experimental results and honest, open, and never-ending debate,” said Bohacs.
He said it would be good to avoid the extremes of “scientism” – the conceit that science can provide all the answers to all questions about life, the universe, and everything, as well as “relativism” – the belief that there are no objective truths, so as to avert the extremes of wanting either too much or too little from science.
“I think that the most appropriate role for science would be to support the decisionmakers in making trade-offs among possible courses of action, to highlight what could be done (and its costs and consequences) and not what should be done – to be what Roger Pielke Jr. calls “an honest broker of policy alternatives.”
Speaking of honest brokers, there is one he always listens to: Susan Mitterling, his wife, who is, he said, “chair of my Continuous Improvement and Humility Committees.”
“She has endured many AAPG meetings and other conferences with me, contributed many of the challenging scenarios in our Field Safety Leadership short course, and listened to my lake and source-rock talks so many times that she could deliver them herself,” he said.
He said that he has been honored to be a part of all it – the science, the research, the volunteer work, being put in charge of the gumbo.
“It has all contributed to the greater knowledge of how the Earth works,” Bohacs added.