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Geophysics in the public service

Editor's note: Historical Perspective is a new feature to accommodate unsolicited articles that deal with historical records and personal perspectives of early geophysics. These invaluable documents are usually written in styles of their own that would often require extensive editing, reorganization, and/or fact verification to suit TLE standards—a process which could, in turn, rob them of their patina and even historical value. To differentiate them from Profiles, Mentoring, and other regular TLE human interest articles, and acknowledge their unique status as historical documents is the reason the Editorial Board has created this new feature. Here, these unsolicited and sometimes unorthodox contributions can be published with only the most essential of microedits and abridgements.

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

Since its founding during 1930, the Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG) has conferred Honorary Memberships (its second highest award) on 135 recipients. Only two have gone to Washington, D.C., bureaucrats. The first of these was given to Vincent McKelvey, a minerals specialist and past director of the U.S. Geological Survey (1971–78). The second was awarded in 1981 to the author, a jack-of-all-trades within federal earth science for nearly four decades (1943–1979). Should you have called me a bureaucrat to my face, however, I would have quickly rejoined, "No! I was just a public servant!"

By a combination of good fortune and serendipity, I became a student of or a collaborator with some of the United States's greatest earth scientists of the past century, two of whom, H. U. Sverdrup and C. G. Rossby, have phenomena named after them. In so doing, it became possible to assist in or even manage a wide variety of technological start-ups. Among these were initiating oceanographic forecasting services for amphibious landings and the offshore oil industry, creation of a "Worldwide Standardized Seismograph Network," monitoring the ocean environment from space, establishment of an ice observing and forecasting service for the American Arctic, and postulating a rational theory of deltaic deposition.

None of these endeavors is in the mainstream of SEG's membership. Nonetheless, there is this fringe area of applied earth science of which all geophysicists should be aware. This essay briefly sketches how one could bounce around for four decades within these fringe areas of geophysics and still earn great satisfaction while doing so.

	Departure from conventional geophysics

 
As was true of many exploration geophysicists, my first employment came as a "jug hustler" on seismic party 3 of the Carter Oil Company. My title of "attached helper" at $1668 per annum was not auspicious. Crew morale was high, however. Our . . . [Full Text of this Article]