Without the highly for-profit nature of the industry or the politics of fossil fuels, exploration geophysics would otherwise be celebrated as the cutting edge of tech and engineering. Some of the most arcane and esoteric electrical measurements and signal processing techniques I've seen come from these miners and oil drillers.
e.g. The only three practical applications of a gravity gradiometer are like: (1) Answer fundamental physics questions about the Earth and the universe. (2) Obtain navigational data for inertial guidance system to nuke someone else with nuclear ballistic missiles. (3) Find oil.
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@niconiconi yep, Gaussian processes/kriging were invented for finding oil and minerals, and that's 30(?) years ago
@niplav@schelling.pt I remember reading an HP app note from the 1980s about RF circuit measurement using time-domain reflectrometry. The note said they found the main results were already derived years ago in geophysical journals for seismic analysis.