96 OCEANOGRAPHY 



These are not technicians. Tliese are professional geophysicists. 

 This is a higlily competitive field so we pay a great deal of attention 

 to costs and performance considerations. This work must produce 

 both in quality and quantity and therefore the crews are organized 

 to perform their activities in the most efficient and economical manner. 



The data gathering activities which can be accomplished by semi- 

 skilled or unskilled labor are performed by such labor supervised from 

 a quality control standpoint by party scientists. 



The amount of offshore work actually done in the industry is modest, 

 I think, compared to the total amount of work performed by non- 

 industrial agencies. 



In the peak year of our marine effort, 1954, I think there were some 

 28 ships and smaller vessels actively engaged and in 1959 this total 

 had been reduced to 10 vessels or something of that nature. 



These operations require the use of specialized persomiel. You 

 might think that this decline would be severe but you can readily 

 transfer people from land to water in geophysics so that you simply 

 pull them back to land operations which increased. 



We in industry rely almost entirely on the use of converted vessels 

 for marine survey operations. 



In Texas Instruments, we have two, the motor vessel Sonic, which 

 is a converted Navy LCS and the Texin, which we have just pur- 

 chased. 



Since 1954, the Sonic has surveyed m detail some 20,000 miles of 

 seismic line under contract to the petroleum industry, primarily in 

 shallow offshore waters and bay areas. 



However, a few years ago, we successfully did a job in 16,000 feet 

 of water in a project designed to determine the origin of the Bahamas 

 Islands. 



To give you some statistics, in the period 1944: to 1959, about 4,000 

 crew-months were expended on marine survey activity. From 1930 

 to 1959 there were about 20 crews engaged in marine survey activity 

 each year and the number of personnel on the water each year 

 amounted to about 300, of which 100 were scientific. On shore, in 

 data reduction and analysis of the data, we had about 200 people, the 

 average total being about 500 a year engaged in marine survey work. 



We, incidentally, utilize all of iho, navigation tecliniques and we 

 anticipate using the transit satellite system when it becomes available. 



For analysis of results, the need for automation is evident if you 

 consider that on a production survey an underway vessel can accumu- 

 late an astimated 18 million discrete measurements in the course of 1 

 year. Obviously, you must automate to be able to handle data on 

 that volume. 



We employ many of the more powerful mathematical and theoreti- 

 cal tools to use in the interpretation of this kind of result. Instru- 

 mentation, we feci and, as has been pointed out, is somewhat inade- 

 quate in this general area. 



The geophysical industry faced a like situation in its infancy and 

 solved it by developing and manufacturing its own instrumentation 

 l)ccause the market for this equipment is relatively limited and it pro- 

 vides little economic incentive for widespread manufacture. For that 

 reason, the capability is contained wholly within our own industiy. 



