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Note this verse is one sentence. One sentence with 119 words and about 25 separate phrases. This is a complex and complicated sentence with a lot of linkages. How many of us have the self confidence to write a sentence like this? How many of us can make a claim about something totally unknown in our day, and 180 years later have it recognized as having occurred? We do have a knowledge of the creation of the earth today. In 1830 there was only the very beginnings of understanding the science of geology and physics and chemistry and no knowledge of geophysics and astrophysics and numerous other sciences related to knowledge of the creation of the earth. Today, scientists have power to know all things, and yet many, if not most, reject the Holy One of Israel, reject the fact "this power to know" is a gift from him, and reject it is a gift of faith. To me, recognition of the truthfulness of this one phrase is a more proof of the divine source of The Book of Mormon than holding the gold plates would be.
Claiming the time would come when there would be there would be those having a knowledge of the creation of the earth is a very strong statement to make when The Book of Mormon was published in 1830. The first version of William Smith's "map that changed the world," a map of the stratigraphy of England and Whales, was published in the spring of 1815 in London. To think the importance of and especially the derivatives to come from this map made it across the Atlantic Ocean to rural upstate New York to be included as a phrase in one verse of The Book of Mormon, which book was published by an unschooled farm boy a mere 15 years later, is almost more unrealistic than claiming Joseph Smith wrote The Book of Mormon himself. This is especially true when you consider developments and new understandings since 1830 in volcanology, metamorphism, sedementary processes, plate tectonics, faulting, understanding the growth of reefs, the impact of global eustatics (or sea level changes) on geological depositional patterns, etc.
We truly do have a knowledge of the creation of the earth today. Over my 40 year career I have been privileged to know and work closely with some of the best geoscientists who have ever lived, people who have helped the world come to this knowledge. While only about 10% of the following list are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, I anticipate each of these scientist knows my church membership and commitment, and I further anticipate they each have more postive than negative things to say about our joint geotechnical work. This list is shared to stress the kinds of developments which have happened, just in my career, to provide mankind with a better knowledge of the creation of the earth:
- Dr. Robert Otis, University of Utah ("U") Ph.D. student, later with Chevron, who was my "Big Brother" at Phi Sigma Kappa Fraternity, who introduced me to geophysics and the Pan American Scholarship, and who built a 3-D visualization of my first map: Thickness of Sedimentary Rocks in Yellowstone Lake;
- Dr. William Lee Stokes, taught geology at the "U" for 32 years, headed the department for 13 years, was an expert in the Morrison Formation which contains much of the domestic supply of uranium and vanadium of key importance in World War II, and I met with him a couple of time to get guidance on classes and career plans;
- Dr. Kenneth L. Cook, taught geophysics at the "U" for 30 years and was head of the Department of Geophysic for 11 years, doing meticulous research on the earth's crust and upper mantle, was married to one of my Dad's cousins, and was not shy about giving me advice when I was a student;
- Dr. Stanly H. Ward specialized in electrical methods of exploration, was Chairman of the Department of Geology and Geophysics at the "U" from 1970-1980, and was one of the professors I helped when I worked for the department;
- Dr. Ralph Shuey, taught at the "U" for several years, where he was my first faculty advisor, after which he went to work for Gulf Research, where he helped launch Amplitude vs. Offset direct seismic detection methods;
- Dr. F.W. Christiansen, was a geology professor at the "U" for 30 years and chairman of the department, discovering five coal and cement quality limestone sites which were mined for over 50 years, he was my geology professor, and introduced me to Riley Skeen who was my room mate and has been a close friend for since 1970;
- Dr. Frank Brown, a faculty member of the "U" since 1971, where he was chair of geology and geophysics for 3 years, and then became dean of the College of Mines and Earth Sciences, making significant contributions to paleoanthropology and Paleolithic archaeology in Africa focused on the 4.5 million years of early human evolution in the Lake Turkana basin, and kindly responding to questions and comments from a religious geophysical student interested the implications of his work;
- Dr. Bob Smith, a world renouned earthquake geophysicist who has studied the geodynamics of the Yellowstone hotspot and set up the integrated earthquake hazzard assessment network along the Wasatch Front was my advisor, when I returned to the "U" after my mission to England;
- Bob Kallwait, my manager at Pan American (summer 1970) and Amoco (summer 1973) in Denver, and who, with Larry Wood, wrote some fundamental papers on Zero Phase Wavelets and seismic resolution;
- S. Parker Gay, Jr., now 80, a structural geologist and aeromag geophysicist founded Applied Geophysics in Salt Lake City, has done extensive aeromag mapping of basement fault controled structures throughout the northern U.S. and Peru, recently wrote a book about an exploration approach based on reactivation tectonics, hired me when I was a student at the "U", and we have worked together on several projects in the years since;
- Bob Peacock was the top manager at Mobil's ESC (Exploration Services Center) when I first went to work at Mobil, (his brother Elwin Peacock has become a friend through the GSH (Geophysical Society of Houston), their father, Henry Bates Peacock was one of the pioneers of reflection seismology, an early employee of GSI (Geophysical Services Inc.) and pioneer of reflection work in the San Joaquin Valley in California in 1928) when I went to work for Mobil, he talked me into not leaving Mobil over IP (Intellectual Property) rights my first week on the job, and was the Manager of Mobil Norway when they purchased several Landmark workstations;
- Ron Krinzke, started at Mobil Oil the same time I did, has worked for Texas Eastern, Monsanto Oil, Amerada Hess, co-founded Gryphon Exploration Company, and is currently the Executive Vice-Presidend of Exploration for Petsec Energy Inc. where we have done some joint gas exploration projects;
- Clem Novosad, a geophysicist at Mobil Oil, mentored me on a Nigerian project which resulted in a new offshore platform, and a remapping of the Statfjord field, which had significant economic upside for Mobil;
- Jack Peffer, President of MEPSI (Mobil Exploration and Producing Services International) when I finished the training program and was assigned as his assistant, working on projects from China to Peru to Brazil to the Faulkland Islands to Nigeria;
- Courtney Gans, Mobil Team Leader, had extensive experience in the Middle East exploration, introduced me to Mobil's first 3-D seismic survey, onshore Turkey, and helped me obtain a position in Field Operations to broaden my seismic acquisition experience, where I met Harry Maynes, who invented CDP seismic processing, and where I helped design and collect Mobil's first 3-D survey in the U.S. near Pinedale, Wyoming;
- Byron Arnason, a Mobil trainee I became friends with, who went to work in Field Operations, then left Mobil to do electromagnetic exploration, particularly for minerals;
- Dr. Fred Hilterman, Founder of the Seismic Acoustics Laboratory (SAL) at the University of Houston, who with his CSM classmate, Dr. William S. (Bill) French, developed physical seismic modeling, who also developed numerical seismic modeling technologies building a theoretical foundation for direct hydrocarbon indicators like AVO (Amplitude vs. Offset), who hired me from Mobil to be the General Manager of the Seismic Accoustics Laboratory, and who I later worked with for a couple of years at Geophysical Development Corporation (GDC), now Geokinetics, on some exploration projects in China;
- Dr. G. H. F. (Gerry) Gardner, who designed and collected and invented ways to process the first 3-D seismic survey when he worked for Gulf Oil, and who was one of the Principal Investigators at the SAL, giving me the title of General Manager;
- Dr. Norman Neidell, geophysicist and entrepreneur who worked at Gulf Research, was peripherially involved in the SAL, has been involved in interesting enhanced seismic resolution projects over the years, and who recently hired me to work with him as an expert witness law suit involving seismic reprocessing;
- Dr. Tom Smith, a Ph.D. student at the SAL who founded and for many years ran Seismic Micro Technology (SMT), which has become the major competition to Landmark Graphics Corporation in recent years;
- Dr. Wulf Massell, Director of Research at Geosource, founder of EPIC Geophysical, consultant, friend, and co-founder of Dynamic Resources Corporation (DML);
- Dr. Don Vossler, geophysicist at Geosource who worked for Landmark, SMT, developed software for automatically identifying and ranking by size and by depth AVO anomalies in 3-D seismic surveys, and who is a friend and co-worker;
- Dr. Robert Tatham, geophysicist at Geosource, then Texaco, now at the University of Texas at Austin, and who listed me as a co-author on a paper about which used physical modeling to predict seismic response in carbonates offshore Florida and which was published in Geophysics;
- Dr. Dan Kosloff, a professor at the University of Tel Aviv who spent several summers at SAL with his students, including Dr. David Kessler, founder of Seismic City, a leading pre-stack depth migration seismic processing shop in Houston, which has developed new ways to process seismic data to get a more accurate image of the subsurface in depth;
- Dr. Robert Sheriff, geophysicist from Chevron, then professor at the University of Houston where my assistant at SAL and the AGL (Allied Geophysical Laboratories) typed the first draft of his book Encyclopedic Dictionary of Applied Geophysics;
- Dr. Anne Simpson, geophysicist Fred Hilterman hired to run the IPL (Image Processing Laboratory) at the AGL, formerly the project lead at MIT's GAG Group (Geophyical Analysis Group) which invented digital signal processing for geophysics, which is the basis of our modern computer systems, then a geophysist at Western Geophysical, Digicon, and after the IPL worked with me at Landmark Graphics Corporation (LGC) and HyperMedia Corporation (HMC).
- Alf Klaviness, Texaco geophysicist who invented SeisLine, an analog geophsical signal processing tool which he donated to the AGL, who retired and started several revolutionary projects to better understand the subsurface, who is known as the founder of the OTC, and who I have done a half a dozen projects with over the years;
- Alistair R. Brown, geophysicist at GSI who was instrumental in the development of interactive seismic interpretation, publishing several editions of the key book on 3-D seismic interpretation, which describes in detail how 3-D seismic gives us detailed knowledge of the creation of properly imaged parts of the earth, and who has been a friendly competitor to several projects I have worked on;
- John Denham, former Chief Geophysicist at BHP Petroleum (Broken Hill Proprietary) who purchased the first delivered Landmark workstation and who jointly published a paper in Geophysics with me describing how to predict subcropping coal and unconformity trapped oil and gas fields by calculating residuals between smoothed and original seismic horizon picks;
- Les Denham, John's twin brother, geophysicist in Antartica, in Greenland with the Danish Geological Survey, with GSI, at Seiscom Delta, with Newmont Oil, co-founder of Interactive Interpretation & Training (II&T), has been a partner and coworker since the late 1990's, and is a co-founder of DML;
- Malcolm Holmes, Chief Geophysicist at Enterprise and discover of the Nelson Field (named after Lord Nelson) in the North Sea using amplitude extraction technology from LGC;
- Andy Roberts, geophysicist at Imperial Chemical when they took delivery of LGC workstation #1, and who wrote "Curvature Attributes and their application to 3D interpreted horizons," published in The First Break in February 2001;
- Blaine Taylor, a petrophysicist who drilled wells in Israel, became Vice-President of Information Technology at Conoco by the time he retired, is now technical support at SMT, and who has worked with me on projects at Mobil in Dallas, Fletcher Challenge Petroleum in New Zealand, PetroBank in Norway, and others;
- Dr. Roger N. Anderson has been at Columbia Uinversity for over 35 years, where he is a Doherty Senior Scholar at the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory of the Earth Institute and an adjunct Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, he founded the Borehole Research, Global Basin Research Network (GBRN) with me, 4-D Seismic, Reservoir Simulation, Portfolio Management, and Energy Research Groups, vPatch Technologyies with me, 4-D Technology, Bell Geospace, CALM Energy, and has spent the last several years has been the Principal Investigator of a team of 15 scientists and graduate students working with Con Edison on the next generation Machine Learning software for intelligent control of the smart electric grid of New York City;
- Dr. Larry Cathles, did his doctoral research on the viscosity of the earth's mantle, spent seven years with Kennecott Copper studing the genesis of porphhyry copper deposits, taught at Pennsylvania State University, worked at Chevron Oil Field Research, becoming a Cornell faculty member in 1987, co-founding the GBRN with Roger and me, creating geologically realistic models of fluid flow and hydrocarbon maturation, as well as models of the chemical alteration accompanying fluid flow in a temperature gradient, hydrothermal circulation and oxygen-isotopic alteration at mid-ocean ridges, linking basin dewatering and sulfide mineralization in the Kupferschiefer deposit in Poland, and modeling related phenomena to help improve our knowledge of the creation of the earth;
- Mike Forrest, retired Chief Geophysicist at Shell in the U.S. is credited with inventing bright spot technology (direct detection of hydrocarbons with seismic amplitudes), has been on the Board of Directors of several oil companies, including Burlington Resources, is a director of the SEG (Society of Exploration Geophysicists) Foundation, a director of Global Geophysical Services, Chairman of Rose & Associates DHI Risk Anaysis Consortium, and is heading up DRC's (Dynamic Resources Corporation, 100% owned by me) Technical Advisory Group;
- Dr. Sam LeRoy, a geophysicist and geostatitican at Texaco, then Conoco, and then formed Earthview Associates where he does geophysical and geological consulting, and where we have partnered on several exploration projects jointly publishing papers on geopressure pods, seismic velocity and geopressure, and have co-authored with six others a patent pending in 118 countries relative to on-shore electromagnetic exploration for natural resources;
- Dr. Tracy Stark, a geophysicist at Exxon-Mobil Research, then at Arco Research, who then started Stark Research where he developed and patented several innovative tools for understanding the creation of the earth, including unwrapping seismic phase to convert seismic traces to geological age through geochronostratigraphic reconstruction, creating Wheeler seismic volumes showing geologic times of non-deposition, displaying multiple parallel seismic lines or slices simultaneously to see dip and structure, and has used these tools on several joint projects with me;
- Dr. Geoff Dorn, geophysical researcher at Arco who took the Arco Visualization Lab to The University of Colorado at Boulder when BP purchased Arco, has since developed state-of-the-art 3-D visualization software to work with seismic and well data, and who worked with Tracy and Kay and Wulf and me on several SEG Research Committee Workshops for the annual conventions.
- Kay D. Wyatt, top notch geophysicist at Phillips Petroleum, who worked with Tracy, Wulf, Geoff, and me on several SEG Research Committee Workshops prior to the merger of ConocoPhillips;
- Dr. Peter M. Duncan, geophysicist for Shell Oil in Canada who left to form Exploitec with Digicon, which was purchased by LGC and then spun off as a separate company, who left Exploitec to work with me at Continuum Resources Corporation, then recruited as the President of Chroma Energy (hiring me as a consultant), and then starting MicroSeismic, where they are using passive seismic measurements to monitor frac jobs and optimize production of oil and gas;
- Herr Dr. Dr. Dietrich Welte, a geochemist who developed software tools to model the thermal maturation of geologic basins, the cracking of karogen to form hydrocarbons, along with the migration and trapping of hydrocarbons through his company IES (Integrated Exploration Systems GmbH), and whom I had the honor to meet with several times and to work with when I was still at LGC;
- Dr. Bjorn Wygrala, a
- John Masters
- Dr. Peter Vail, John Sangree, and Bob Mitchem of Exxon who unravelled the sedimentary processes known as sequence stratigraphy;
- Tury Taner, who developed seismic attributes;
- Ward Abbott of Shell and Occidental who independently developed similar models showing the impact of global tectonic movements on sedimentary fill;
- Dr. D. Bradford Macurda, Jr., who has trained the oil and gas industry worldwide in sedimentary processes;
- Nigel Anstey, who wrote the book on geophysical interpretation, and his partner Dr. David A. T. Donohue, who is still writing the book on exploration and production through IHRDC;
- Gary Jones, ;
- John Kerr, ;
- Chuck Edwards,
- Meng Ersheng, Chief Geophysicist of the BGP (Bureau of Geophysical Prospecting) in the Ministry of Petroleum Industry (now the China National Petroleum Corporation or CNPC) from 1973 to 1988 with technical responsibility over 250 seismic crews, President of the SPG (Society of Petroleum Geophysicists, and affiliate of the Chinese Petroleum Society) where he was instrumental in bringing together SEG and Chinese geophysicists in the 1980's, a Life Member of the SEG, who arranged for LGC to send a team of 4 geoscientists to work for a couple of years interpreting seismic and well log data in the Ji Ji Subbasin of the Hua Bei Oil Field, which I managed for LGC;
- Huang Bing Hing, former Chief Geologist of the BGP
- Xu Da-Kun, former President of BGP,
- Yan Dun Shi former Chief Geologist of the Ministry of Petroleum Industry in The People's Republic of China;
- Lu Bang Gang, former Chief Geophysicist of the Ministry of Petroleum Industry
- Weng Wenbo, director of exploration for the China Petroleum Exploration Company, chief engineer of the Exploration Bureau for the Petroleum Ministry of China, vice-president of the Petroleum Research Institute, chief engineer of CNPC (China National Petroleum Corporation) Research Institute of Petroleum Exploration and Development (RIPED), and director of the China National Committee of Natural Disaster Forecasting, is famous for his prediction of a significant earthquake in China, and I was able to have private meetings with him on a couple of different occassions;
- Dr. Scott Bowman
- Dr. Robert Sneider
- Alex Massad, Executive Vice President of Mobil Corporation and President of Mobil's Worldwide Exploration and Production Division managed development of the giant Arun gas field in northern Sumatra and exploration and development of the Statfjord Field in the Norwegian North Sea, and after his retirement I was able to recruit him as an investor in HyperMedia Corporation, where he became the key member of the Board of Directors, working closely with me during the mid-1990's until I had to shut down the company.
- Alan Peterson ;
- Dr. Heloise Bloxsom Lynn, anisotrophy expert from Stanford;
- Swede (Duane O.) Nelson first president of Chevron Overseas Petroleum Inc.
- Dr. Amos Nur, Stanford;
- Dr. Jude Amaefule, now with Emerald Energy in Nigeria;
- Gehard Brink, ;
- Randall Etherington;
- Dr. Bob Hardage, ;
- Richard Nerhing, creator of the database Significant Oil and Gas Fields of North America and a partner;
- Mike Dunn
- David Johnson
- Dr. Lee Bell
- John Walker
- Luis Viertel
- Dr. John Doran
- Dr. Richard L. Coons
- Marvin Rathke
- Herbert Hunt, PetroHunt
- Dr. Tom Davis, CSM
- Dr. Bob Ehrlich, the father of geostatistics and a partner;
- Dr. Jim Siebert
- and others, whom I forget, probably an affliction of age.
Geoscientists are good people. They study data, and change their mind when new data becomes available. We all have a bias, and there is no question my church bias guides interpretation of data which can be related to church teaching, just as some with no interest in religion use their bias to guide their interpretation. The bottom line fact is modern scientists, including my friends and co-workers listed above, have individually contributed to unravelling different parts of our current knowledge of the creation of the earth. Much of this unraveling occurred over 150 years after The Book of Mormon predicted it would happen. And the unravelling has occurred in a time when we have had all commandments from the beginning, with the privledge of seeing - for those who will - the United States as the precious land of promise, and in a time when most reject the Holy One of Isreal, the true Messiah, their Redeemer and their God.
I remember distinctly reading this verse some years ago and feeling in my heart the Holy Ghost was bearing witness to me these words prove the existance of God, and demonstrate his guidance of the prophets who wrote, abridged, and translated these words for us. This is an internal evidence of the truthfulness of The Book of Mormon, showing to me this book of scripture is what the prophet Joseph Smith and many since claim it to be. If you have not read The Book of Mormon with an open mind and a sincere heart, I encourage you to do so, for I know, as surely as I know the difference between magnetite and gypsum crystals, you can find this truth for yourself, if you read and pray. And there will be tremendous benefits for you over the rest of your life and through eternity after finding this truth. |
