When I first went to libya in 1984 I was an ‘Assistant Seismologist'. My job function was to determine the static corrections needed to apply to the seismic data so it all made sense in the processing cycle. To do this we had a couple of Mayhew 1000 drilling rigs mounted on Belgian MOL trucks. They'd go out to the location we directed and drill typically a 10 cm diameter hole to a depth of up to 100 meters. I'd then lower a geophone down the hole, hit a metal strike plate with a sledge hammer and record the travel time of the sound wave. I'd then pick the geophone up 5 meters and strike the ground again, repeating this till the geophone was back on the surface. Back in camp I'd then get out th graph paper and plot the time and distance chart to develop a surface velocity model and from that, calculate the static corrections.
This image was taken in 1985 in the dunes about 50 km west of Maradah, libya on Fujichrome Velvia using an olympus xa rangefinder point-and-shoot camera.
