Patent ID: 8229950

Claim:
A paleogeographic search system for locating oil exploration data relevant to a geographic search aperture by identifying regions of the earth that were proximal neighbors in the past, but are not necessarily proximal neighbors today, the paleogeographic search system comprising: a user interface adapted to receive inputted information into the paleogeographic search system, wherein the inputted information includes: geographic information defining the geographic search aperture, which comprises at least one of a spatial distance metric, a geographic coordinate, or a geometric shape, and a geological age of interest; a paleogeographic reconstruction engine, operative to transform the geographic search aperture, according to tectonic plate movements, to a transformed search aperture that the geographic search aperture occupied in the geological age of interest; and a host processor operative to: acquire a search from a geodatabase for oil exploration data according to a paleoaugmented geographic search aperture, wherein the acquiring search comprises hydrocarbon information from multiple geodatabases relevant to the transformed search aperture and wherein the paleoaugmented geographic search aperture is defined by: augmenting the transformed search aperture to include relevant proximal locations for the selected geological age of interest to create an augmented transformed search area; and transforming the augmented transformed search aperture, according to tectonic plate movements, to the paleoaugmented geographic search aperture in present day world geography using the paleogeographic reconstruction engine; generate a list of specific items of relevant natural resource data; and compare the items based upon search results from the multiple geodatabases.