COCORP – A GREAT IDEA AND THOSE BEHIND IT

Sometimes great ideas in geology are not concerned with the rocks or the formation of surface features, but they are related to new technology and/or new applications of existing technology that are used to explore the earth, both inside and out. One fine example of this would be the development of the petrographic microscope which opened up a new world in rock and mineral understanding. Another, more recent example is COCORP, which stands for the Consortium for Continental Reflection Profiling which was formed in early 1970s. The idea was to use existing reflection profiling techniques, widely used in petroleum exploration, to examine the deep continental crust. The first trials were successful and suddenly we were able to see the continental crust with a new set of “eyes.” Also COCORP provided a model for collaborative research on a scale not normally associated with earth science, and soon this research model and seismic techniques were repeated in many other countries, e.g., BIRPS (British Institutions for Reflection Profiling), DEKORP (German deep seismic group), ECORS (French), LITHOPROBE (Canadian), etc. In this paper we want to focus not so much on the success of the program, which has been well documented, but to take a brief look at some of the people who generated the concept and did the original development; especially Jack Oliver and Sidney Kaufman. At the time Oliver was Department Chair at Cornell University (Ithaca, New York) and Kaufman, recently retired after many years with Shell Oil Company, had just accepted a faculty position at Cornell. We will explore the lives of the key people and the motives behind their decision to pursue the "great idea" of COCORP.