Quick
Search: 
 
advanced search
 GSW Home    GeoRef Home    My GSW Alerts    Contact GSW    About GSW    Journals List    Help 
The Leading Edge Don't get GSW? Talk to your librarian.
JOURNAL HOME HELP CONTACT PUBLISHER SUBSCRIBE ARCHIVE SEARCH TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Leading Edge; 2005; v. 24; no. Supplement; p. S18-S25; DOI: 10.1190/1.2112387
© 2005 Society of Exploration Geophysicists
This Article
Right arrow Abstract
Right arrow Figures Only
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow Submit a response
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me when eLetters are posted
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrow reprints & permissions
Citing Articles
Right arrow Citing Articles via Google Scholar
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Clark, D.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
GeoRef
Right arrow GeoRef Citation

SEG's first 75 years

Dean Clark, TLE Editor

The official, documented birthday of SEG is 11 March 1930. Some might think this was the result of the development of the torsion balance by Baron von Eötvös in the late 1890s ...

... or with the early seismic experiments by Irishman Robert Mallet in the 1840s ...

... or with Descartes, Galileo, and Newton and the scientific revolution of the 1600s ...

... or even with Herodotus who describes a military application of a zero-offset, near-surface seismic reflection survey 2000-plus years before Descartes ...

... but most think the events of the 1920s were the major reason. During that decade, exploration methods based on seismology (Figure 1) and gravitation were confirmed in the field, the first well logs were recorded, the first contracting company was started (and several others were about to be created), and, most importantly, the practitioners of these then-arcane techniques were finding lots of oil. Thus, by early 1930, all the elements were in place to support a professional society dedicated to the new discipline. The catalyst for the the formation of the new organization was Donald C. Barton, who had received much of the credit for the first discovery of commercial quantities of oil by a geophysical method (a torsion balance survey in 1924).



View larger version (145K):
[in this window]
[in a new window]
 
Figure 1. The first exploration seismograph party to operate on a geologic structure in the United States: Oklahoma, August, 1921. The seismograph party consisted of Reginald G. "Rex" Ryan, William P. Haseman, and John C. Karcher. This photo was published on p. 942 of the October 1952 GEOPHYSICS.

 

Donald C. Barton

In July 1929 Barton, in a letter to many of his colleagues, proposed formation of a geophysical society. This resulted in a meeting, at Houston's University Club, on 30 January 1930 at which an organizational committee was appointed. This group worked expeditiously and SEG was formed, at a meeting of 29 men and one woman, at the University Club less than six weeks later.

The preceding paragraphs have carefully avoided spelling out the actual name because, although SEG was formed on 11 March 1930, it was the Society of Economic Geophysicists—which it would remain for only a short time but which was still two iterations away from the current SEG manifestation. Barton, undoubtedly to the surprise of no one, was elected president. The accelerated timetable—which seems, in retrospect, amazingly fast—continued and a constitution and bylaws were adopted at a banquet at Houston's Lamar Hotel on 20 May. In December, Everette De Golyer and Ludger Mintrop were awarded Honorary Membership and the first paper with official imprimatur was distributed.

(Note: The first distributed paper was "A suggested method of approach for the determination of salt dome overhang,"a title that would be appropriate in 2005. However, this was not the first paper that was approved for publication. That article was not released for publication because of patent considerations—an issue that remains topical today—until the next year.)

The society held its first Annual Meeting, in conjunction with the AAPG convention, in March 1931. Thus, in just one year the new Society had produced the foundation for its governance and started three of its most important activities—publications, meetings, and honors and awards. Much of this was probably due to the leadership of Barton who was re-elected president in 1931, thus becoming the first (and to date only) person to serve in that office for more than one term.

SEG's membership was 41 at the end of its first year, double that at the end of its second, and redoubled again by the end of its fifth. Considerable credit for this steady membership increase in the early years is also due to E.E. Rosaire, according to George Elliott Sweet (author of The History of Geophysical Prospecting).

"Barton and Rosaire were bosom pals, and Barton was always in Rosaire's office talking about a society for geophysicists," Sweet said in a 1988 interview. "After it got going, Rosaire was the guy who did the legwork to get people to join. I was a classic example. I attended all the preliminary meetings, but I guess I was out of town when they had the first official meeting because I'm not a charter member of SEG. Rosaire called me a couple of years later and asked ‘Isn't it about time you joined?’ I immediately sat down and wrote him a check."

Because this growth was occurring during depressed economic times, Rosaire's salesmanship must indeed have been of very high quality.

SEG became SPG, the Society of Petroleum Geophysicists, in 1931 and would exist under that name for nearly six years. However, little else changed. Meetings were held annually, and journals were published regularly. AAPG published annual volumes of the Transactions of the Society of Petroleum Geophysicists from 1931 to 1935 and a sixth volume, titled the Journal of the Society of Petroleum Geophysicists, also in 1935.

The major decision of this first decade, and arguably the most important (and biggest financial risk), came in 1936 when SPG's leadership decided to dramatically increase the frequency of publication. The first issue of GEOPHYSICS, A Journal of General and Applied Geophysics, appeared in January 1936 and two other issues were published that year. GEOPHYSICS became a quarterly publication the next year, and continued to publish 4–5 times per year until 1960.

From our vantage point of several decades in the future, respect must be paid to the prescience and the boldness of those who made this decision. In my opinion, a case can be made that this was the biggest financial risk ever undertaken by SEG. The society had about 200 members when the decision was made to start publishing GEOPHYSICS several times per year. The membership list, published in the January 1937 issue, occupied only seven pages. More interesting were some numbers on page 84 which reveal that SEG's total income from 1936 was US$4952.54, and its publication expense was US$2651.43.

However, the gamble on GEOPHYSICS, if it was one, paid off immediately. Membership more than doubled in the year following the first issue of the journal.

Two other far-reaching decisions were finalized just a few months after the birth of GEOPHYSICS.

One was to, once again, change the name of the society and thus, on 1 January 1937, SPG once again became SEG, the Society of Exploration Geophysicists. (There has been some talk, some in jest and some not, in recent years that, due to the sudden transformation of development and production geophysics from obscure subdiscipline to major focus of most members, the society should adopt yet a third variant of SEG—the Society of Exploitation Geophysicists. Stay tuned.)

Again, from our future perspective, the initial reaction to the permutations regarding the name is that a lot of effort was devoted to a rather trivial matter. Further analysis, however, modifies that view considerably. The "name" debate was connected to a major philosophical issue confronted by SEG's earliest executive committees—whether to more closely associate with geologists or physicists, personified, respectively, by AAPG and the American Physical Society (which had also published geophysical papers in its journal Physics). The late Paul Lyons (the 1954–55 SEG president) summarized, many years later, the contemporary reasoning:

In 1930, a committee headed by G.H. Westby sought affiliation with the American Association of Petroleum Geologists. This culminated in a charter issued to SPG by that organization, dated March 26, 1932, confirming the society as the Division of Geophysics of the AAPG. This cooperation among geologists and geophysicists, early recognized as a necessity, has been a continued and rewarding association.

The SPG observed its first national convention by meeting with the AAPG in San Antonio in 1931, and the AAPG graciously published the geophysical papers presented there in the November and December issues of their Bulletin. The new Society also met with the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society at New Orleans in 1931, and nine of the 13 papers presented there were ultimately printed in the March 1932 issue of Physics. The SPG allegiance was torn between physics and geology. It was fitting that geology won out, but there was to remain many a nostalgic yearning for the Physical Society...

A rapid growth began in 1936 and in that year at the Tulsa meeting with AAPG, the name was changed to Society of Exploration Geophysicists. Significantly, this widened the scope of the society to include geophysicists not engaged in the search for oil and gas, and to include geophysicists from all over the world.

Another major decision, made essentially simultaneously with the rechristening, was to resign as a division of AAPG and apply for reinstatement as an affiliated society—a declaration of independence, in other words, although some might think that complete independence did not arrive until 1955 when SEG ceased holding its annual meetings in conjunction with the AAPG convention.

So, in retro-retrospect, these decisions coming in quick succession—creating GEOPHYSICS and publishing several issues per year, changing the name to encompass all disciplines of geophysics and all practitioners no matter where their geographic coordinates, and declaring independence from AAPG—must rank with the most far-reaching ever taken by the society's leaders.

The yearly increases in membership, even though slowed in the late 1930s by the advent of World War II, soon overwhelmed the officers and volunteers who were handling SEG's administrative affairs. John H. Wilson ended his 1936–37 annual report with the sentence: "I give up the office of secretary-treasurer with relief and extend my sympathy to my successor."

The solution was to employ permanent staff, and this began in 1939 when J.F. Gallie was hired as business manager. This caused SEG to lead a nomadic existence for several years because the position was part-time and Gallie, a professional geologist, changed employers and residences often. Consequently, between 1939 and 1946, when Colin Campbell was hired as SEG's full-time business manager and the business office permanently relocated to Tulsa, Oklahoma (USA), the mailing address was successively in Austin, Houston, Washington, and El Dorado, Arkansas (USA).

Membership continued to grow steadily through the early 1940s and passed 1000 in 1943. However, the various restrictions imposed by the war (particularly governmental curbs on travel in the United States) kept the organization and functioning of the society at a status quo level.

That changed quickly and dramatically after the war ended, starting with the hiring of the first full-time employee in 1946. In the next year, SEG assumed its "modern" organizational structure when the constitution was amended to create the council as the ultimate governing body and to authorize the establishment of local sections. Response to the latter was immediate ... the Geophysical Society of Tulsa promptly appeared (with a charter membership of 150, five times SEG's initial membership) and applied for affiliation (Figure 2).



View larger version (151K):
[in this window]
[in a new window]
 
Figure 2. The first temporary officers of the Geophysical Society of Tulsa, the first local geophysical society to petition for affiliation as a local section under the revised SEG constitution. Standing left to right: Stanley W. Wilcox, V.L. Jones, R. Clare Coffin. Seated, left to right: Colin C. Campbell, E. Jack Handley. Photo appeared on p. 302 of the April 1947 GEOPHYSICS.

 
Other major initiatives of this period which are still of major importance in SEG operations were the adoption of a Code of Ethics, the creation of the Best Paper in GEOPHYSICS Award (first presented in 1947), and the establishment of a Distinguished Lecturers Committee (the first tour was in 1950).

As is regularly pointed out, SEG has never done any geophysical work or invented any geophysical instrumentation or developed any geophysical theory. Its role is to expedite all of the above by all possible means, primarily publications and professional meetings. A clear indication that SEG had reached widespread acceptance in this role was the January 1948 issue of GEOPHYSICS which was almost exclusively dedicated to the subject of multiple reflections—not on how to annihilate them, a subject that remains a high research priority and about which TLE recently published a special section. The subject in 1948 was one that will astonish most current SEG members—do multiples exist? Subsequently, this issue of GEOPHYSICS has been cited as the point at which the current paradigm about multiples was established but many of the 1948 authors remained cautious. For example, the first sentence of the article by Curtis H. Johnson (1952–53 SEG president) is: "These comments and illustrations are designed to show that in Butte County, California, at least, multiple reflections do exist."

Some what more forceful was this paragraph by C.H. Dresbach:

In various places along the east side of the San Joaquin Valley, roughly 30 miles north of Bakersfield, reflected events have been observed that plotted below the known top of the basement. Sufficient well and velocity data are available to locate them quite closely. From what is known of the basement material, it appears unlikely that the rather smooth plotting, fairly continuous events could originate from within the basement. The conclusion is therefore forced that they must represent multiples of some sort.

By the way, that is the entire article! It is one paragraph shorter than Dresbach's biographical sketch in the Contributors section.

The organizational changes implemented in the late 1940s were exceptionally well-timed because much of exploration geophysics was going to change—the word revolution is used, and it is justified—in the next two decades and, as a result of these modifications, SEG was well-positioned to take a lead role in what amounted to retraining essentially the entire workforce.

New developments have occurred with amazing regularity in the succeeding decades but it would be hard to top the 1950s for across-the-board advances. They include at least the seeds of such incredibly important innovations as common-depth-point recording, digital processing, vibroseis, migration of seismic data, and shipboard gravity. In addition, instrumentation originally developed for resource exploration played a major role in mapping the seafloor for the first time ever—a development which would lead to the adoption of the theory of plate tectonics at the end of the 1960s.

SEG began to add at least 200 members per year in the late 1940s, which pushed membership past 2000 in 1949—a critical mass which led the society to make several major decisions during the 1950s. Among the most influential were:



View larger version (80K):
[in this window]
[in a new window]
 
Figure 3. (Left) William W. Butler, winner of the 1952 contest to design a new SEG crest. (Right) The winning crest, which earned Butler life membership, consists of a western hemisphere framed by the traditional mariners' compass. The globe map is used to signify that geophysics is the science of the earth, and the mariners' compass denotes the fact that the science of geophysics is used to explore the earth and its crust in search of mineral wealth. The photo appeared on page 262 of the January 1953 GEOPHYSICS.
 
However, the most important development—and probably the most important since the decision to begin publication of GEOPHYSICS in 1936—was the decision to celebrate SEG's 25th anniversary in 1955 by holding the Annual Meeting in the fall as a "separate" event (i.e., not in conjunction with the AAPG convention).

As with the decision to start publication of GEOPHYSICS, the member response was immediate. Registration in Denver was 1502, an astonishing increase of 803 over the previous year.

Membership continued to grow steadily throughout the decade (including an increase of nearly 750 in 1953) and SEG finished the 1950s with 5657 names on the books.

The technical advances whose theoretical foundations had been laid in the 1950s, particularly the common depth point technique and digital acquisition/processing, revolutionized the profession pretty much from top to bottom in the 1960s. In retrospect, SEG appears to deserve some credit for facilitating this massive readjustment.

The first step in this direction was increasing the frequency of publication of GEOPHYSICS to bimonthly.

The distinguished lecture tours were also valuable venues and featured such very topical subjects as vibroseis (John Crawford in 1963), digital systems (Ken Burg in 1964), and deconvolution (Enders Robinson in 1967).

However, as important as these lectures were, it was quickly recognized that a much more extensive training effort was needed, and SEG responded by establishing a continuing education program in 1967. Amazingly, 14 courses were developed and offered in that first year, about half of them concerning various aspects of the new digital technology which by then was standard for the major contracting companies.

It was also realized that everyone, providers and users, would benefit from some uniformity in practice vis-à-vis the new digital products and services. SEG was a natural choice to determine what was appropriate. A Digital Standards Committee, chaired by John Northwood, was appointed in 1966 and completed its work in just over a year. This put SEG into the standards business, which it has never left, and it is a critical duty that it has executed with dedication and efficiency ever since. This was probably not something envisioned by the founders, but the fact that SEG had been in place for nearly four decades by the time that standards were needed established it as the appropriate body to develop them and assure their instant, and virtually universal, acceptance.

Another development in the 1960s was the first major revision in the Honors and Awards Program. Honorary Membership had existed since SEG's very first year. But only 14 others had been bestowed in the subsequent three decades and these awards were for essentially an extraordinary career. Two awards of Life Membership, for exceptional service to the society itself, had been conferred in 1954 but none in the succeeding years. There was a need to recognize a specific technical contribution or theoretical advance, and this was accomplished in 1961 with the creation of the Medal Award (later renamed the Reginald Fessenden Award). The Virgil Kauffman Gold Medal Award was, thanks to a generous endowment by the founder of Aero Service Corporation, added in 1966 and this was considered the highest SEG honor for the next 12 years.

During the 1960s, SEG achieved a significant milestone by moving into its own office building on 25 June 1965 (Figure 4). The permanent staff at that point was nine and they had plenty of room in the one-story building on 51st Street in Tulsa. But that relative comfort would not last long. Events of the early 1970s would lead to explosive growth in SEG's membership which would, in turn, generate such a dramatic increase in the size of the permanent staff that a second story had to be added to the building less than a decade later. Property on which to build a much bigger structure was purchased only five years after that.



View larger version (154K):
[in this window]
[in a new window]
 
Figure 4. Andrew Gilmour, Ted Born, Paul Lyons, E.V. McCollum, and Craig Ferris at the dedication of SEG's first office building in 1965.

 
SEG also made one of its most lucrative financial decisions at the end of this decade when it accepted an invitation from the Society of Petroleum Engineers to cosponsor an annual oceanographic conference. This became reality in 1969 when the first Offshore Technology Conference was held and in a very short time this forum emerged as the world's major meeting for the oil industry with attendance figures, and related revenue in which SEG shared, that would be mind-boggling.

The impetus behind the amazing growth in membership during the 1970s, from 7110 at the start of 1970 to nearly 13 000 at end of 1979, was the geopolitics/economics of the oil industry which dramatically increased the price of petroleum and triggered a worldwide boom in exploration. The decade is probably best summarized by comparing the 1971 Annual Meeting in Houston (which occurred on the 50th anniversary of the first recordings of seismic reflections) and the 1980 Annual Meeting in Houston (which celebrated SEG's 50th anniversary).

The former had 3776 registrants. The OTC, meeting for the third year, had an attendance of 10 800. In 1980, SEG's Annual Meeting set an attendance record (which still stands) of 12 319 and attendance at OTC had grown by virtually an order of magnitude and was in the range of 100 000 (which it would soon exceed).

SEG's membership started to grow remarkably in the second half of the decade: 737 new members in 1975, 776 in 1976, 994 in 1977, 966 in 1978, and 1002 in 1979. By the end of the decade, SEG's monthly report of seismic crew activity was reporting the highest level in 20 years.

Some other landmarks during that decade were the inauguration of the monograph series (No. 1, Gravity and Magnetics for Geologists and Seismologists by L.L. Nettleton appeared in 1971); the initial publication of the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Exploration Geophysics and Pitfalls in Seismic Interpretation (both in 1973); holding the 1973 Annual Meeting in Mexico City (the only time to date that it has not been in the United States or Canada); the cumulative awards by SEG for scholarships passed US$500 000 in 1975; the Maurice Ewing Medal was created as SEG's highest award and SEG begin publication of its reprints series with Deconvolution (both in 1978); GEOPHYSICS became a monthly and a new family, SEG-D, of tape formats was approved (both in 1979).

Two giants of geophysics died during the 1970s—Maurice Ewing (in 1974, just three days before he was to receive the OTC's Distinguished Achievement Award for Individuals) and J.C. Karcher (the "father" of the reflection seismograph, in 1978). They were linked by another giant, Cecil Green, who received the first Ewing Medal in 1978 and who wrote the memorial for Karcher which appeared in GEOPHYSICS in June 1979. That article contains some interesting comments on a still controversial subject:

The basic principle—detecting the difference between refracted and reflected seismic events—was noted by J.C. Karcher in 1917 as an unexpected event. He was employed by the U.S. Bureau of Standards after his graduate studies in physics at the University of Pennsylvania were interrupted by World War I. With the cooperation of the U.S. Navy, he was experimenting with a new method for locating artillery by timing air and seismic waves the explosions created. Air transmission proved more reliable because it provided more constant velocity, and he soon discarded the seismic approach for this application. But, most importantly, Karcher had designed and built effective geophones for the experiments .... He had carefully noted the physical phenomena of signals echoed from subsurface strata and had filed it away in a fertile mind for future reference.

The exponential growth in membership continued into the 1980s—1442 new members in 1980, 1024 in 1981, 1894 in 1982, and 1612 in 1983. Membership would peak at 19 559 in 1985 before a massive readjustment in oil-industry economics started nine straight years of declining membership.

As the membership numbers in the previous paragraph indicate, this was arguably the golden era—at least from a financial point of view—for exploration geophysics and for SEG. In his 1981 Presidential Address, Kevin Barry cited some figures that, a quarter-century later, remain stunning: 744 seismic crews were active just in the United States, worldwide spending on geophysical surveys increased by 46% between 1979 and 1980, and was expected to grow another 25% (to total more than US$4 billion) during 1981, and SEG revenues for 1981 were US$3.5 million (eight times more than a decade earlier). Barry's comments provide some evidence for the relatively low increase in membership in 1981. The SEG staff apparently had been overwhelmed by membership applications, and 800 were remaining to be processed in June when the official membership numbers were tabulated for the year.

The increased revenues and demands resulted in SEG's permanent staff growing to 40-plus in the early years of the decade. Three major changes of permanent impact were also made at this time—the initial publication of THE LEADING EDGE and the Expanded Abstracts volume (both in 1982) and the addition of the Sunday evening Icebreaker to the Annual Meeting in 1981.

When President Red Olander dedicated SEG's new office building, the Cecil and Ida Green Tower (Figure 5), on 25 May 1985, there was still little thought that the good times were about to end suddenly and dramatically. Although geophysical expenditures had been declining since 1980, the general feeling was that they had been unrealistically (and unsustainably) high because of the oil-price "shocks" of the early and late 1970s. The 1985 Annual Meeting, despite a distinctly "nonoily" venue (Washington), had 9107 registrants. However, that was virtually the last ray of sunshine for a decade. Geophysical expenditures in 1985 were 12.9% less than the previous year and there was free fall in 1986 when expenditures on geophysical exploration fell 37%.



View larger version (101K):
[in this window]
[in a new window]
 
Figure 5. The 25 May 1985 dedication of the Cecil and Ida Green Tower in Tulsa, USA, the new business office location for SEG.

 
The industry and SEG made immediate and drastic cost-cutting steps. SEG reduced its budget by 20% and its staff by 16%. SEG's membership rolls declined by 1370 and would continue to shrink for a decade.

The incredible boom and devastating bust were the dominating events of the 1980s, but there were others with influence that is still felt.

A major change in governance was made in 1986 when the executive committee was reorganized to include a president-elect. This had been proposed in 1974 but was not approved by the council. Again, SEG's timing was excellent and the first president-elect, Lee Lawyer, got some invaluable on-the-job training with which to deal with the most serious financial crisis in the society's history. (Due to the timing of the elections and the continuation in office of the current executive committee until the end of the annual meeting, SEG has a "president-elect-elect" for several weeks each year. Everyone agrees that the nomenclature is awkward, but it's now been around for 20 years and no one has produced a better idea.)

Another major, and very successful, organizational change from this era was the creation, in 1985, of the TLE Editorial Board—a group of practicing geophysicists who met regularly to set the magazine's guiding philosophy and goals. It has proved adept from the start at generating timely publication of articles about hot topics in the profession, and this is a major reason that TLE has consistently ranked high on the list of benefits in surveys of the membership.

Despite the constrained finances, SEG's leadership decided to dramatically restructure its book publications program to feature a "top of the line" series dedicated to Investigations in Geophysics. This quickly resulted in what was, to that point, SEG's most expensively produced book, the 1987 publication of the lavishly illustrated, 526-page Seismic Data Processing by ...zdogan Yilmaz. The book defied the prevailing economics of the time to become an immediate bestseller (second only to the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Applied Geophysics among SEG's offerings) and was soon the standard reference on this vital subject throughout the world. In fact, the reception of this book was so strong and continuous that Western Geophysical produced, and SEG marketed, a 15-cassette videotape version in 1990.

Two trends were obvious by the end of the 1980s—that merger mania was rampant within the industry (leading to the demise of such famous names as GSI, Arco, Amoco, etc.), and that increased activity in geophysical exploration would be primarily outside North America. Several SEG executive committees had recognized the trend toward "globalization" and action to truly "internationalize" the society had been a major focus since, at least, 1975 when an Ad Hoc Committee on Exchange Visits between U.S. and Mainland China geophysicists, chaired by Stan Jones, was created. This led to high-level Chinese delegations attending SEG's annual meetings in 1978 and 1979 and to SEG cosponsorship of a major meeting in Beijing in 1985. In 1991 the executive committee adopted a policy of holding a major mid-year meeting annually in a venue outside North America.

Signs of improved industry economics were evident in 1990 when geophysical expenditures, which had fallen to half of the US$4 billion peak, improved by about 15%. SEG's finances also improved and in 1994 the nine-year decline in membership (to slightly more than 14 000) was reversed and gains were recorded in every category. But, in a truly seismic change, the gains were totally from outside the United States. In fact, the number of U.S.-based members continued, and still continues, to decline.

SEG quickly took major steps to address its dramatically revised demographics. Ian Jack, based in the United Kingdom, was elected to the executive committee in 1992. Most succeeding executive committees have had international representation with members from Australia, Venezuela, Norway, Japan, and the Netherlands and others who, although primarily U.S.-based, had close ties to Turkey, Israel, China, France, and the Former Soviet Union.

Greatly facilitating SEG's globalization efforts was the emergence, in the early 1990s, of the Internet. Thanks to the foresight and energy of Brian Spies, SEG got a home page online in 1994 which was hosted by Stanford University and maintained by volunteers. A donation of a server allowed the Internet operations to be brought in-house in 1996 and SEG began adding staff to handle the demands (which eventually led to more and more staff and the creation of the Information Technology department). The extremely high computer literacy rate among SEG members made the Web site much-trafficked from the beginning and brought demands for constant updating and improved services.

The 1980s ended with a restructuring of the SEG Foundation which included the formation of the Trustee Associates which almost immediately assumed the leading role in raising funds for the Foundation's endowment.

Two major changes in 1997 were the inauguration of the Distinguished Instructor Short Course (universally known as DISC) and increasing the Committee on Nominations by adding four "at large" members selected from the sections and associated societies. DISC was established in recognition of the fast-changing world of applied geophysics (the fourth edition of the Encyclopedic Dictionary, published in 2002 under the revised title of Applied Geophysics, contained 63 more pages of definitions than the third which appeared just a decade earlier). The concept underlying DISC was to present a one-day course, at low cost to the participant, on a topic of current interest by a world-class instructor. All of those goals were accomplished at such a high level with the first course, Time-Lapse Seismic in Reservoir Management, taught by Ian Jack, that DISC quickly became one of SEG's most admired "products." The worldwide tours were attracting a cumulative student body of 2000–3000 geophysicists annually. EAGE soon became a cosponsor of the DISC offerings in Europe.

Another major downturn hit the oil industry in the late 1990s but, in what may be the greatest tribute to the role that it had achieved during its first seven decades, SEG was, unlike the downturn of the previous decade, not adversely affected to a serious degree; in fact, membership continued to increase and annual meetings set records for booth sales on the exhibit floor.

The big trend of the 1990s, and one almost certainly to be permanent, was the radically changing demographics of the membership. The "non-U.S.-based" percentage of the membership was growing so rapidly that the SEG crest was redesigned in 1998 to reflect its truly global nature (Figure 6). Two years later the International Affairs Committee, after a major renovation in order to assure representation of all parts of the world, was renamed the Global Affairs Committee and, in this new format, quickly became SEG's largest committee and one of its most active. This was another example of excellent timing for in 2003 SEG's membership passed 20 000 for the first time in history and a majority of the members lived outside the United States.



View larger version (38K):
[in this window]
[in a new window]
 
Figure 6. The SEG crest was redesigned in 1998 to reflect the society's truly global nature.

 
This milestone occurred two years after the most dramatic event in SEG history. During the 2001 Annual Meeting in San Antonio, terrorists flew hijacked airplanes into New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington. SEG's leaders strongly considered canceling the meeting but decided to continue, and the meeting finished its scheduled run without incident. In the days following the meeting, many SEG members spent several days assisting delegates, particularly those from outside the United States, to make travel arrangements to their home cities.

The new millennium began with a spate of books predicting, as has happened routinely since it began in the late 1800s, the end of the petroleum era. This new round of pessimism resurrected "Hubbert's peak"—the 50-year-old graph by the late M. King Hubbert that had been the basis of his famously accurate prediction regarding the peak of oil production in the United States (Hubbert, by the way, was a geophysicist, a multidecade member of SEG, and its editor from 1947 to 1949). Time will tell whether these forecasts are accurate but it is now clear that the ultimate verdict on the length of the petroleum era will be made largely by SEG members.

That statement was easy to make, considering the accomplishments and advances in theory and instrumentation made by SEG members during the past 75 years. More difficult to assess is how another challenge will be answered. That is that geophysics has much to offer outside of scientific exploration for and development of natural resources. This was tellingly brought into focus by the deadly tsunami of late 2004. Would worldwide deployment of geophysical sensors have sent warning signals to the most endangered locations and saved thousands of lives? Almost certainly yes, but whose duty is it to build and maintain such a warning system? The answer to that question is difficult and one that must be settled in the political arena. However, when the decisions are made, SEG, thanks to the vision and energy of its leadership during its first 75 years, is ideally positioned—with a networked global membership which has in-depth knowledge of all regions of the earth, incomparable skill at visualizing the subsurface, superior computer literacy, and access to the most modern equipment—to facilitate the application of geophysical technology to minimize the human loss in natural disasters while simultaneously maximizing the benefits of natural resources.


    Footnotes
 
Dean Clark received a degree in journalism from the University of Oklahoma in 1966. His academic record was so outstanding that he immediately received an offer of employment from one of the world's largest organizations, the U.S. Army. He spent three years in the service and then joined the sports department of the Tulsa World where he spent 12 years as a reporter and columnist. Clark joined the original staff of THE LEADING EDGE in 1981 and has been its editor since 1984.





This Article
Right arrow Abstract
Right arrow Figures Only
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow Submit a response
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me when eLetters are posted
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrow reprints & permissions
Citing Articles
Right arrow Citing Articles via Google Scholar
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Clark, D.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
GeoRef
Right arrow GeoRef Citation


JOURNAL HOME HELP CONTACT PUBLISHER SUBSCRIBE ARCHIVE SEARCH TABLE OF CONTENTS
Copyright © 2008 by Society of Exploration Geophysicists