Discussion: Comments on: “The old and new of fluid indicators: An overview and application” (Farfour and Russell, 2024, The Leading Edge, 43, no. 5, 294–302)

The matter I want to raise in this note is about the “background trend” mentioned in Farfour and Russell (2024). It has been shown that this is an artifact ( de Bruin, 2019 , 2020a ). The authors refer to a number of publications, including several by accomplished geophysicists, who all got this “trend” wrong in the 1980s and 1990s. The list includes names like Castagna, Goodway, Hilterman, Foster, Connolly, and Russell. Regardless of all the rewards those papers have accumulated, if it's wrong then it's wrong. The success of amplitude variation with offset (AVO) fluid indicators has nothing to do with the “well-defined background trend” referred to in Farfour and Russell (2024):