Once in a while a story comes along that just screams “exploration technologies,” and recently I was gifted with this one. Jim Sledzik, president and senior partner at Energy Ventures, made sure that this one found its way into my inbox. If one really needs a timeline of the evolution of geophysical technology over the past 60 years, one needs to look no farther than this.

Here is the description: “Western Profile was the employee magazine of Western Geophysical from the 1950s to 2000, when the company became part of Schlumberger and was renamed WesternGeco.

“Western Profile chronicles not only the development of geophysical technology but also tells the personal and timeless stories of geophysicists, mechanics, surveyors, land and marine personnel, administrators, safety professionals, engineers, and the many other skillsets required in the ever-changing search for hydrocarbons.

“The Western Profile historical archive came to life on the SEG [Society of Exploration Geophysicists] website through a collaboration of interested parties. Gary Jones had the idea of preserving such history for coming generations. Rhonda Boone, long-time managing editor of Western Profile and today a communications consultant to Schlumberger, provided him with a complete set of bound magazines. Richard White, Jeff Springmeyer and Jones underwrote the scanning of the entire collection under the guidance of Mike Forrest and Bill Barkhouse of SEG, who recognized the value of this archive and were instrumental in seeing the project come to fruition.”

What an undertaking! And what a very generous gift to the geophysical community. Naturally I had to poke around, and here are some of the gems that I found.

January 1954. In the inaugural issue, then-president Henry Salvatori noted that the magazine was being launched because employees requested it. “With the far-flung nature of our operations and the continuous changing of field locations, you told us that a magazine would serve to maintain contact with your employee friends,” Salvatori wrote.

The issue also commemorated the one-year anniversary of the company’s research laboratory in Los Angeles as well as including articles penned by several company employees. These are loving snapshots of the crews and their families, with one anonymous author noting, “When the words ‘magazine’ and ‘writing’ were mentioned to me, my first thought was ‘Oh, horrors.’”

And then they chose to rerun an article that ran in the January 1950 issue of The Reader’s Digest about a gas station attendant in Ohio who pulled people out of auto wrecks in his spare time. Still looking for that perfect tone, apparently.

Winter 1985. By the 1980s the magazine had evolved to include a color photo on the cover and included a lengthy article about the development of multiclient surveys, then referred to as “spec.” There were still crew updates, but these were professionally written articles that didn’t sound quite so much like someone’s holiday letter.

Spring/summer 2000. This issue focused on the upcoming merger with Geco-Prakla, and the Western Profile ceased publication. But its annals live on. Check it out at http://seg. org/Publications/Journals/Western- Profile. It makes for some interesting reading.

Contact the author, Rhonda Duey, at rduey@hartenergy.com for more information.

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