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Potential fields

Gaining more respect and recognition

TLE Editorial Board

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

Time flies when you are having fun. This has certainly been a fun career for me to meet and interact with interesting professionals from around the world. TLE celebrates its 20th anniversary June 2002. Likewise, my career odometer is about to roll into 20. I completed my graduate studies in June 1982; however, it took me a month to find a job in Houston. Thus, there is really a one-month anomaly. Twenty years of experience working in both the petroleum and mineral industries has provided me a diverse technical background in geophysics.

When you think of potential fields, two pioneers stand out. They are LaCoste and Romberg. Their contributions to our professional society, the energy industry, and scientific community are invaluable. From my point of view, potential fields have been an underrated and underutilized remote sensing technology. And in these days of environmental awareness, it is essentially a noninvasive tool. Data can be acquired from satellites, airplanes, ships, or simply on foot, offering no endangerment to wildlife and its habitats or ecosystems. Gravity and magnetics are excellent reconnaissance tools that can offer more value for the dollar than conventional 3-D seismic surveys. Despite their tremendous cost advantage, potential fields received lukewarm support from petroleum companies in the last two decades, as measured by their small exploration budget. Meanwhile, huge amounts of capital were invested in seismic imaging technology.

The development of potential fields began in the 1920s, accelerated with the deployment of the magnetometer in the early 1940s, and gained greater application when the sensor was mounted . . . [Full Text of this Article]