An introduction to geophysical tomography

Abstract

Whilst the appearance of the word 'tomography' in the geophysics literature is a relatively recent phenomenon, geophysicists have been carrying out tomographic surveys from the very birth of the subject. The location of salt domes in the Gulf Coast during the 1920s using fan refraction shooting was a tomographic experiment. Bois et al. (1972) carried out a well-to-well seismic experiment in 1970 and imaged the velocity field between the two wells, but did not choose to refer to the work as tomography.