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The Leading Edge; August 2002; v. 21; no. 8; p. 746
© 2002 Society of Exploration Geophysicists
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The Gassmann story

Peter Gretener

University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada

Corresponding author: P. Gretener, fax 1-403-284-0074

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

Fritz Gassmann published his classic paper "Elastic waves through a packing of spheres" in GEOPHYSICS in 1951. At that time I was a member of a motley group of Gassmann's graduate students—one mathematician, one theoretical physicist, one experimental physicist, one civil engineer, and two geologists (there was no undergraduate geophysics program in those days)—who were blissfully unaware of its fundamental significance. This is hardly a surprise considering our inexperience.

The broad background of our graduate student group proved helpful in many ways. Just two incidents may illustrate the point. The other geologist had to deal with a well-rounded clastic sediment, and he figured that he should be able to deduce the grain size distribution from just a single thin section or polished surface. He enlisted the help of the mathematician. The latter kept scratching his head for quite a while (remember this was 1950) but did come up with the solution eventually. My own field was gravity measurements, and I was dissatisfied with the very-near station terrain corrections (the middle- and far-field sections were well covered by graticules in the literature). I put the theoretical physicist to work and he came up with slanting "cake pieces" which produced satisfactory results. Gassmann . . . [Full Text of this Article]






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