An issue of the RECORDER with history as its focus should include a look back at the development of the ideas that form the foundations of what geophysics is about in the current day and age. It was thought that so called “classic” papers should be reviewed with an eye towards identifying where they fit in the overall scheme of exploration geophysics, with perhaps a bit of a look forward to where the concepts might lead.
In this issue there are three such commentaries.
In the first, Keith Edwards, Chief Geophysicist at Rosetta, reviews a fairly obscure paper from Geophysics, Morrison and Watson, 1961, entitled: The electronic computer and geophysics. This particular paper is probably not a “classic” in its own right but the subject matter is close to everybody in the geophysical world.
The second has Brian Russell providing commentary on Roy Lindseth’s 1979 Geophysics paper on inversion; Synthetic sonic logs – a process for stratigraphic interpretation. As the first commercially available acoustic inversion, Seislog foreshadowed the rich offering of inversion and rock property products currently available, and is still offered commercially at Teknica. In many ways this commentary is a bonus article: two CSEG legends in one article, which has some historic significance in its own right. Russell and Lindseth are two of the three people who have been CSEG President, and have received the CSEG Medal, the Meritorious Service Award, and Honorary Membership. The third individual with all four of those distinctions is John Boyd.
The third commentary comes to us from the pairing of Gary Margrave (U of C) and Mike Perz (Geo-X). They provide commentary on the early work of Robinson and Treitel concerning deconvolution.
Future commentaries are in the works. We hope to have articles that examine papers such as Leon Thomsen’s Geophysics paper on anisotropy (the most frequently cited paper in Geophysics), Nigel Anstey’s Leading Edge discussion called Whatever Happened to Ground Roll, Ostrander’s 1984 AVO paper, and Harry Mayne’s 1962 Geophysics classic on Common reflection point horizontal stacking techniques.