What is it about?
Increasing discovery and use of oil was not automatic. Discovering oil required invention and innovation in business and technology. Even when techniques using the seismograph were perfected, the market demand was low. Timing was a crucial factor.
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Photo by Sam Moqadam on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Society may be in the midst of an energy transition currently away from oil. People look to alternatives such as solar, wind and to sources such as nuclear and natural gas. The transition to oil may seem obvious and inevitable as an afterthought but it was not and offers an important example of how energy transitions do and do not occur. By studying the transition to oil, we can understand how future energy transitions.
Perspectives
I enjoyed writing this article because many within the seismic industry recognize that the invention of the reflection seismograph was an important event but as a historian I wanted to connect it to larger trends like energy transitions and to the unexpected turns of the market.
Brian Frehner
University of Missouri Kansas City
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Monumental geophysics: J. Clarence Karcher and the reflection method, The Leading Edge, June 2021, Society of Exploration Geophysicists,
DOI: 10.1190/tle40060404.1.
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