• journal_title：The Leading Edge
• Contributor：Dean Clark
• Publisher：Society of Exploration Geophysicists
• Date：2005-
• Format：text/html
• Language：en
• Identifier：10.1190/1.1901385
• journal_abbrev：The Leading Edge
• issn：1070-485X
• volume：24
• issue：4
• firstpage：350
• section：SEG 75th ANNIVERSARY

SEG's second decade began with a clear signal that applied geophysics had evolved into a mature scientific discipline—the nearly simultaneous appearance of three text books by widely recognized experts (Exploration Geophysics by J.J. Jakowsky, Geophysical Exploration by C.A. Heiland, and Geophysical Prospecting for Oil by L.L. Nettleton). The page count of these three books was an indication of just how fast and how far geophysics had advanced in the 16 years since the first time that a geophysical survey had led to the discovery of commercial quantities of petroleum. Nettleton's book (perhaps because it was limited to oil exploration) was the runt of the litter at a mere 650 pages. Jakowsky's book was 786 pages and included a list of patents at the end of each chapter (interestingly, patents had already been granted in the USA, UK, Canada, France, and USSR). The book by Heiland, the leading geophysical educator of the time in the United States, was a gargantuan 1013 pages and that drew both praise and criticism in the review by E.A. Eckhardt which appeared in the January 1941 issue of Geophysics: