Depositional faciesanalysis and modelingof the Judy Creek reefcomplex of the Upper

re not

cited in our article. In the following section, wewillexplain why those two publications were not citedin our article.

As shown in Table 1, we do cite two AAPGpublications (Jenik and Lerberkmo, 1968; Hemphill

Copyright 2011. The American Association of Petroleum Geologists. All rightsreserved.1Schlumberger Data and Consulting Services, 6501 South Fiddlers Green Circle, No. 400Greenwood Village, Colorado 80111; YMa2@SLB.com2Formerly Pengroth Corporation, now Penn West Petroleum Ltd, Calgary, Canada

The AAPG Editor thanks the following reviewer for his work on this article: ErnestMancini.

Manuscript received April 26, 2010; final acceptance June 8, 2010.DOI:10.1306/06081010068of work authored or coauthored by him weDevonian Swan Hills,Alberta, Canada:ReplyY. Zee Ma1, Andrew Seto2, andErnest Gomez1

First, we thank Wendte (2011) for reading ourarticle (Ma et al., 2009). In his discussion, he raisedsome general issues and some specific questions.For the sake of the scientific integrity,wewill openlyaddress all the issues and questions that Wendteraised. We will first discuss his general questions.

One of Wendtes main issues is that we didnot, to use his words (p. 169), cite references tosupport the stratigraphic framework and faciesanalysisAs can be seen from our article, we citefour such publications seven times, including fourcitations of two publications coauthored byWendte(Wendte andMuir, 1995;Wendte andUyeno,2005),to support the stratigraphic framework and faciesanalysis.Wendte pointed out that two other piecesAAPG Bulletin, v. 95, no. 1 (January 2011), pp. 172 174 172et al., 1970) that predate the two uncited publi-cations authored or coauthored byWendte (Wendteand Stoakes, 1982; Wendte, 1992). Moreover, wecite the two more recent refereed publications byWendte and his coauthors (Wendte and Muir,1995; Wendte and Uyeno, 2005), which in turncite their two pieces of previous work. We did notinclude the short course note by Wendte (1992)and the conferencemanual byWendte and Stoakes(1982) because we felt that the latter refereedpublications byWendte and his coauthors (Wendteand Muir, 1995; Wendte and Uyeno, 2005) pro-vided more updated information. Furthermore,the main theme of our article is, to use Wendtesterminology, numerical modeling, and those fourcited publications, especially that of Wendte andUyeno (2005), give enough background. We un-derstand that the four cited refereed publicationsfacilitated our research work, including the prep-arationof our article, as theyprovide valuable sourcesthat support the stratigraphic framework and basicfacies analysis in our article. More detailed discus-sions and citations on the Judy Creek and regionalgeology, however, would change the focus of ourarticle.

We think that Wendte would agree with theprinciple of citing necessary references, not all therelated references in the literature. As a matter offact, in Wendte and Muir (1995), they did notrefer to two related AAPG publications (Jenik andLerberkmo, 1968; Hemphill et al., 1970).

We will now discuss the issues and questionsthat Wendte raised in more detail. Regarding thesubdivision of the reef complex into cycles (R0R5C), Wendte (second paragraph in his discussion,p. 169) stated that, However, they do not presentevidence or cite references to support these sub-divisions. As can be seen in the second paragraphon page 1238 of our article, the articles by Wendteand Muir (1995) and Wendte and Uyeno (2005)are cited to support the first- and second-ordertransgressive-regressive cycles that are used in thestratigraphic correlation and framework.

In paragraph 3, p. 169, Wendte gives a sum-mary of the subdivision of the reef reservoir andthe ramp-bounded shoal complex based mostlyon his 1992 publication. These subdivisions are

dy C

lletinPG MPM Sre CPG MPG Balso discussed in detail and used in the article byWendte and Uyeno (2005), which is the referencewe used and cited (see Ma et al., 2009, page 1238,paragraph 2).

In our article, we state 11 depositional facieswere interpreted to which Wendte, in his par-agraph 4, points out that we did not provide cri-teria or cite references for the recognition or in-terpretation of their facies.This sentence was onlyfor background in our article, and it is simply atransitional sentence because we immediatelymoveon to discuss facies groupings that are more di-rectly related to the modeling of the compositefaciesa main theme of the article. Note that onpage 1242 paragraphs 3 and 4 and on page 1250paragraph 3, we tie the facies that we are using tothe conceptual depositional models presented inWendte andUyeno (2005) and cite this publication.Wendte also pointed out that his interpretationand nomenclature of facies were different fromwhat we used. The reason for this is that the arti-cles by Wendte and Muir (1995) andWendte andUyeno (2005) are more of regional-scale studies.Our work is focused on the reservoir and its nu-merical modeling. With more detailed data at thereservoir scale, we have modified Wendte and

Table 1. Related Publications (Refereed and Nonrefereed) to Ju

Author(s) Yr

Wendte and Uyeno 2005 BuWendte and Muir 1995 AAWendte 1992 SEWendte and Stoakes 1982 CoHemphill et al. 1970 AAJenik and Lerberkmo 1968 AAhis coauthors facies terminology to address thisobjective. These differences are the reasons forwhich we could not cite his publications in thisparagraph.

Wendte put two figures in his discussion, ap-parently to argue that we should have cited his twoother pieces of work. His first figure shows nomen-clature of cycle boundaries from Wendte (1992).Notice that, in his ownwords, this figure is actuallya modified version from the article byWendte andMuir (1995) (see figure 1 in Wendtes discussion),which is cited in our article. We felt that we didnot need to cite his 1992 course note as we alreadycited his 1995 refereed publication that has thesame figure. Regarding his second figure fromWendte and Stoakes (1982), an updated versionappears in his Wendte and Uyeno (2005) publi-cation that we cited in our article. Therefore, wehave cited all the necessary, pertinent, and up-to-date references. The overlaps between differentpublications by Wendte et al. (Wendte, 1992;Wendte and Muir, 1995; Wendte and Stoakes,1982; Wendte and Uyeno 2005) were obviouslyout of our control. As we previously stated, wecited the most up-to-date publications availablethat we used, conforming to the general practice ofscientific publications.

In the last paragraph, Wendte states (p. 171) a serious question remains regarding the originof the stratigraphic framework and facies namesin Ma et al. (2009). Are these the products of orig-inal research by Ma and his colleagues or are theybased on work done by others? As we alreadydiscussed, the stratigraphic correlation and faciesnomenclature that we used are based on the fourpublications, as shown in Table 1, and in particular,

reek Geology and Citation Status in Our Article

Where Published Cited or Not

of Canadian Petroleum Geology Citedemoir 63 Citedhort Course 28 Not citedonference Manual Not citedemoir 14 Citedulletin CitedWendte and Uyeno (2005) provided the most di-rect information. We have cited these publicationsseven times in our article. Although our article isnot a detailed stratigraphic and facies study of theDevonian at Judy Creek, we want to ensure thatsufficient credit is given to the contributions of pre-vious workers on whose work ours is based. None-theless, we need to point out that for the purpose ofnumerical modeling, some of the facies and forma-tion tops at the reservoir scale indeed caused some

Ma et al. 173

Canadian Society of PetroleumGeologists, Core Confer-ence Manual, p. 6381.minor differences in the stratigraphic frameworkfrom regional-scale stratigraphic correlations. In ad-dition, more data were obtained after Wendte andothers publications, andminor changes were madein the interpretations to construct the stratigraphicframework at the reservoir scale. We also dealt withfacies differently to facilitate our numerical modeling.

Wendte finishes his discussion by saying (p. 171)it is important that they provide the primaryreferences in which these interpretations were firstpublished. The article by Wendte (1992) is such afundamental reference. Frankly, we do not agreewith this statement. For any scientific publication,the author(s) must always impose a reasonablelimit on howmany references and how far back tocite possible publications, especially for publicationsthat are not directly of themain themes of the article.In fact, if toomany references are cited, the reviewerscommonly suggest removing less up-to-date ones.For example, in the discussion of propensity, wecited Poppers refereed article (Popper, 1959), butnot his (Popper) 1957 article that is known as thefirst interpretation of propensity as probabilitybecause the (Popper) 1959 article provides suffi-cient information to our article (seeMa et al., 2009,page 1236, paragraph3). Similarly,we cited the2002edition of Logic of Scientific Discovery by Popper(2002) instead of his German edition published in1934 and first English edition in 1959 (seeMa et al.,2009, page 1244, paragraph 2).Moreover, what isprimary and fundamental is commonly not clear. Inthe case of Judy Creek geology, Jenik and Lerberkmo(1968) and Hemphill et al. (1970) are some of theprevious publications we found and cited. We arewondering, are those two cited publications lessprimary or fundamental than some uncited work?In fact, we considered Wendte and Muir (1995)andWendte and Uyeno (2005) as fundamental andmore up-to-date sources of stratigraphic correla-tion that support our stratigraphic framework atthe reservoir scale, which iswhywe cited these twopublications four times in our article.

In summary, our article is not a review articleon Judy Creek geology, but on, to use Wendtesterminolgy, numerical modeling. The four citedrefereed publications (Table 1) on Judy Creek orregional geology provide all the necessary and up-174 ReplyWendte, J., and T. Uyeno, 2005, Sequence stratigraphy andevolution of middle to upper Devonian Beaverhill Lakestrata, south-central Alberta: Bulletin of Canadian Petro-leum Geology, v. 53, no. 3, p. 250354, doi:10.2113/53.3.250.to-date information to support the research on themain theme of numerical modeling in our article.We thank Wendte for reading our article.

REFERENCES CITED

Hemphill, C. R., R. I. Smith, and F. Szabo, 1970, Geologyof Beaverhill Lake reefs, Swan Hills area, Alberta, inM. T. Halbouty, ed., Geology of giant petroleum fields:AAPG Memoir 14, p. 5090.

Jenik, A. J., and J. F. Lerberkmo, 1968, Facies and geometryof Swan Hills reef member of Beaverhill Lake Formation(Upper Devonian), Goose River field, Alberta, Canada:AAPG Bulletin, v. 52, no. 1, p. 2156.

Ma, Y. Z., A. Seto, and E. Gomez, 2009, Depositional faciesanalysis and modeling of Judy Creek reef complex of theLate Devonian Swan Hills, Alberta, Canada, AAPG Bulle-tin, v. 93, no. 9, p. 12351256, doi:10.1306/05220908103.

Popper, K., 1957, The propensity interpretation of the calcu-lus of probability, and the quantum theory, in S. Krner,ed., Observation and interpretation: London, ButterworthScientific, p. 6570.

Popper, K., 1959, The propensity interpretation of probability:British Journal for Philosophy of Science, v. 10, p. 2542,doi:10.1093/bjps/X.37.25.

Popper, K. R., 2002, The logic of scientific discovery: 14threprint (1st English edition in 1959, German edition in1934): London, United Kingdom, Routledge, 513 p.

Wendte, J. C., 1992, Evolution of the Judy Creek complex, aLate Middle Devonian isolated platform-reef complex inwest-central Alberta, in J. C. Wendte, F. A. Stoakes, andC. V. Campbell, eds., DevonianEarly Mississippian car-bonates of the Western Canada sedimentary basin: A se-quence stratigraphic framework: SEPMShort Course 28,p. 89125.

Wendte, J., 2010, Depositional facies analysis and modelingof the Judy Creek reef complex of the Upper DevonianSwanNills, Alberta, Canada: Discussion: AAPGBulletin,v. 95, p. 169171.

Wendte, J., and I. Muir, 1995, Recognition and significanceof an intraformational unconformity in Late DevonianSwan Hills reef complexes, Alberta, in D. A. Budd,A. H. Saller, and P. M. Harris, eds., Unconformities andporosity in carbonate strata: AAPG Memoir 63, p. 259278.

Wendte, J. C., and F. A. Stoakes, 1982, Evolution and cor-responding porosity distribution of the Judy Creekreef complex, Upper Devonian, central Alberta, in W.G. Cutler, ed., Canadas giant hydrocarbon reservoirs:

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