Word For The Day: Drupe -- November 23, 2022

Nigeria, from Breitbart:

President Muhammadu Buhari of Nigeria announced on Tuesday [November 22, 2022] the discovery of a massive oil reserve in the north of the country that may hold over a billion barrels of crude.

Buhari said the Kolmani area in which the oil was found is estimated to hold over one billion barrels and another 500 billion cubic feet of natural gas.”

This discovery has been described as a massive untapped reserve.

Let's put that in perspective.

From The Oil & Gas Journal, December 17, 2021:

USGS reports that Williston basin’s Bakken and Three Forks formations within Montana and North Dakota include 4.3 billion bbl of unconventional oil and 4.9 tcf of unconventional natural gas, both reduced from its 2013 assessment.

The US Geological Survey (USGS) reports that Williston basin’s Bakken and Three Forks formations within Montana and North Dakota include 4.3 billion bbl of unconventional oil and 4.9 tcf of unconventional natural gas.

This assessment is for undiscovered, technically recoverable resources and updates a 2013 USGS assessment of Williston basin which found that undiscovered reserves totaled 7.4 billion bbl for Bakken and 6.7 tcf for Three Forks.

Since the 2013 assessment, more than 6,400 additional wells have been drilled in the Bakken formation, and about 4,100 wells have been drilled in the underlying Three Forks formation, resulting in both more production and more knowledge of the basin’s resources.

To date, more than 17,500 total wells have been drilled into Bakken and Three Forks formations, and about 4 billion bbl oil have been produced from these units.

The Bakken boom began in Montana in 2000 and in North Dakota in 2007.

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Word for the day: drupe.

Link here.

The olive is a fruit from the olive tree, also known as Olea europaea. The parent family of this tree species is Oleaceae, which includes the flowering trees lilac, jasmine & forsythia.

The olive tree produces a type of fruit called a drupe. A drupe is a fruit with a fleshy outer part and a single, hard seed on the interior. Some other common drupes include peach, plum, cherry and mango.

Not all drupes are juicy and sweet right off the tree. The drupe classification also includes fruits like coffee and pistachio, both of which are cultivated primarily for their seeds.

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The Archeology Page

From The New Yorker:

Around forty-three hundred years ago, in a region that we now call Iraq, a sculptor chiselled into a white limestone disk the image of a woman presiding over a temple ritual. She wears a long ceremonial robe and a headdress. There are two male attendants behind her, and one in front, pouring a libation on an altar. On the back of the disk, an inscription identifies her as Enheduanna, a high priestess and the daughter of King Sargon.

Some scholars believe that the priestess was also the world’s first recorded author.

A clay tablet preserves the words of a long narrative poem: “I took up my place in the sanctuary dwelling, / I was high priestess, I, Enheduanna.”

In Sumer, the ancient civilization of southern Mesopotamia where writing originated, texts were anonymous. If Enheduanna wrote those words, then she marks the beginning of authorship, the beginning of rhetoric, even the beginning of autobiography.

To put her precedence in perspective, she lived fifteen hundred years before Homer, seventeen hundred years before Sappho, and two thousand years before Aristotle, who is traditionally credited as the father of the rhetorical tradition.