By ROBERT DEAN CLARK
     Assistant Editor

     Cornell's Kimball Hall is merely the wing of a building, disguising its inadequacies under a formal title usually affixed to solitary, majestic, ivied academic structures. Three of its five floors house, more like warehouse, the university's department of geological sciences. The overwhelmed facilities are the result of a remarkable resurrection - at the end of the 1960s this department's immediate ancestor was clearly fated to academic backwaterdom. Today the department is nationally respected and is attracting graduate students with superlative credentials.
     Weekday mornings on the third floor rarely vary. The first to arrive, usually an hour before anyone, is Sidney Kaufman, who were he betogaed instead of betweeded would pass for a Biblical patriarch in a Hollywood cinemonstrosity. The normal gauges - overall appearance, energy level, mental acuity - indicate a perfectly tuned, late fiftyish scholar for whom upcoming retirement will be the inauguration of a new, equally active phase, not a steady fading away.

     However, Kaufman's mien, like Kimball Hall's aggrandized name, is an illusion. He is nearly 75 and almost 10 years into a second career as a teacher and executive director of a multi-million dollar geophysical research project, the Consortium for Continental Reflection Profiling. He is fully five decades senior to most who will filter into the building by the start of normal working hours, and nearly all of those later arrivals would need a handicap to match him erg-for-erg in productivity.
     Kaufman needs the hour from 7 to 8 to organize piles of mail. They dominate a claustrophobic office. He reads innumerable journals and tends to the blossoming bureaucracy engendered by COCORP - the consortium's merciful acronym. On most days, those extra 60 minutes are the only time available for his routine officekeeping; after the rest of the staff and students assemble, his tiny sanctuary is transformed into an open house, the non-stop traffic due in equal parts to his contagiously enthusiastic personality, superior professional experience and skill, and a computer-quick brain quite free of scientific biases.

     This open, ever-curious mind is what distinguished Kaufman's first career - 38 years with Shell as one of the most versatile exploration geophysicists. Without that resilience, his career would have ended abruptly. Like many who grew up with the profession, Kaufman barely knew what a geophysicist was ("never mind how to spell it") until some time after he was one.
     His field was classical physics. He received his doctorate from Cornell in 1934 and spent the next year as a Coffin Foundation Fellow. As the fellowship was ending, Kaufman, like others propelled into the work force during the depression, "interviewed everywhere and took the first job offered."

     It came in a telegram from Shell. However, Kaufman wasn't home when the wire arrived. He had just left to visit his girl friend, Goldie, who lived a half-hour away.
     "My mother knew where I was going. So she called Goldie to tell her I had gotten this telegram from Shell. Goldie told her to open it and read it to her. By the time I got there they'd already decided I'd take the job and they even had the wedding planned. Our honeymoon trip was the 4-1/2 days it took to drive from New Jersey to Houston."
     Hurried or otherwise, the marriage eased what might have proved to be difficult transitions for Kaufman - easterner to westerner, city boy to rural, student to supervisor, blackboard classroom scientist to commercial protagonist. Goldie evolved as one of the few with an overdrive biology matching her husband's. She also possessed considerable charm, broad interests, with no antipathy toward the gypsy life. This combination made her an ideal companion for her novitiate husband/explorationist.
     "She was as eager as I was," Kaufman says, "to travel, to see new things, to meet new people. The only time she stalled was in Louisiana when we rented a place with a kerosene stove. Goldie had never seen or heard of a kerosene stove and had absolutely no idea how to cook on it."
     (Even today, Goldie Kaufman's daily assault on life is floorboarded. Transplanted late in life from the semi-permanent sauna of Houston to the comparative Arctic of Ithaca, she hardly broke her vigorous stride, soon becoming an avid cross-country skier and now complaining if the upstate New York winters don't cooperate.)

     Just four months after reaching Houston, Kaufman was pioneering on the mineral exploration frontier. The first month he spent in the lab, the next three as an assistant party chief. Then Shell gave him his own crew. At that time, crew chiefs enjoyed an independence and authority almost as great as ship captains, operating mostly in rural areas, far from headquarters, and having to make critical decisions on the spot.
     This autonomy soon made Kaufman an unwelcome protagonist in offshore work. Amphibious seismic crews (Kaufman's was one) did exist in the 1930s, but their work was confined to shallow, inland areas per limited drilling technology. By 1937, Kaufman was mapping a structure along the south Texas coast near Rockport. The formation went into the Gulf of Mexico. Kaufman, on his own, decided to follow it - renting some shrimp boats and their crews at $28 a day and modifying equipment for the deeper, rougher water.

     Harry Mayne says in his 1982 paper, The Evolution of Offshore Seismic Exploration: "Kaufman's crew was able to progress about four miles offshore into about 65 feet of water before his home office questioned his sanity ... but Petty Geophysical re-invented an almost identical operation for work in both the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico around the Florida Keys during World War II. Those and a few other pioneer operations represented the entire offshore effort until about 1946 when interest escalated and serious design efforts on special equipment started."
     Kaufman even filmed part of his 1937 sea shoot, a record which confirms its historic primacy. But this distinction did not, as Mayne points out, impress Shell, Kaufman comments: "They were almost aghast. They thought I had been wasting crew time in an area that couldn't possibly be drilled."

     Other than the offshore adventure, Kaufman's field time was routinely nomadic - more than 30 moves in five years. This ended when the United States entered World War II. Kaufman volunteered, was quickly commissioned by the Navy, and assigned to the First Naval District in Boston. He was again on a scientific frontier, officer-in-charge of secret work ("Marine guards at the doors") on a new and critical item in the allied arsenal - radar.
     After the war, he returned to Shell but only after extracting a promise that he not be assigned field work. "We had two small children and it was time to settle down. Shell assigned me permanently to the home office. Instead of my headquarters, Houston became my home."
     Home it remains, even though most of the past nine years has been spent in Ithaca. The Kaufmans have not sold their Houston home (they rent in Ithaca, a new house each year) and return to it during the summers.

     Kaufman's new job description at Shell, senior physicist, did not pigeonhole his talents and soon he was managing some exotic projects. Within the next five years he helped adapt radar for navigation of Shell's new marine operations, designed a computer (when this word was still largely confined to science fiction), and developed seismic models using electronics.
     The navigation system was sufficiently sophisticated to be placed under US government security classification. "Apparently it was quite similar to what the Navy was doing at the time," Kaufman says. The modeling study was formally presented at the 1951 World Petroleum Congress as Laboratory Studies of Transient Elastic Waves - the first publication in the field, "a legitimate scientific first," Kaufman says, "not something like just being the first to go on the water." The paper made his name familiar to Jack Oliver, then a young geophysicist starting his academic career. Nearly a quarter-century later, they would launch COCORP at Cornell, beginning a collaboration soon to reach major stature.

     Kaufman served four years, 1958-62, as head of Shell's instrumentation department. From then until his 1973 retirement he was assistant to the vice president for exploration research and development, with the rank of senior staff research physicist. It was tacit recognition that his versatility was a great corporate asset - too valuable to be hamstrung by a routine assignment. "In every big company, you'll find somebody who doesn't fit a slot. That was me at Shell. I was out on the side of the organization chart. If there was something which didn't fit neatly into one of the departments, it came to me."
     During the final years at Shell, Kaufman simultaneously became the firm's (and by extension, the geophysical industry's) unofficial but semi-permanent liaison with the US government on scientific matters. Also, he had long been active in important committee work of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists. He has chaired SEG committees on magnetic recording, radio facilities, and cooperation with government agencies. He is currently, and has been for several years, the SEG representative to the US Geodynamics Committee.

     The highlight of this extra-curricular service was early 1960s membership on the geophysics advisory panel of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. A co-panelist was Hugo Benioff, a seminal figure in seismology and a man Kaufman had long admired. "I was overwhelmed when I learned I had been asked to serve on a committee with him. There was a scientist, a real scientist, a man whose work really meant something to humanity."
     Kaufman reached retirement in 1973. Unexpectedly, it lasted less than three months. "I had been looking forward to it but I got a lot of interesting job offers."

     Cornell's came at one of those committee meetings now so intermingled in Kaufman's memory that the various casts and sundry settings have merged into a mélange. Kaufman can't pin down the particulars - exactly what the group was and exactly what part of California it was - but he does remember Oliver (a frequent committee colleague since the early 1960s) being surprised to learn of his imminent retirement - hard proof concerning Kaufman's ever-youthful aspect, the disguise fools even PhDs of long acquaintance.
     Oliver immediately asked Kaufman to come to Cornell, where he had recently assumed departmental command, to oversee the genesis of a daring research project - studying the continental basement (the region of the lower crust and upper mantle) via reflection seismology.
     Daring though it was, that controversial concept was virtually all Cornell had to offer; its reputation in geology was poor and its facilities primitive, particularly for a man accustomed to the executive suite rococo and technological wizardry of a major oil company. In addition, and most telling, there was no guarantee the project would be extended by the sponsoring National Science Foundation unless promising data were quickly delivered.

     But tenuous as the project then was, it nonetheless triggered something in "Kaufman the scientist" to the point where considerations of "Kaufman the recent retiree" (who would have preferred a gentler climate and plusher appointments) were irrelevant. The thought that Cornell's project might prove scientifically important and that his talents could be a key to that end made his decision almost automatic. He set up shop at Cornell in late December 1973. His retirement from Shell had been in September.
     The basic idea of COCORP had enjoyed circulation for a few years but otherwise Kaufman inherited little. Oliver comments: "All we had was a grant of $25,000, just to look at feasibility. We hadn't spent very much of the money so I decided to hire Sid with the rest. It was the only master stroke of my career."

     Since Oliver orchestrated the rise of eminence of Cornell's department of geological sciences and was the 1981 winner of the American Geophysical Union's Bucher Medal, that assessment is becomingly modest. But there is no doubt Kaufman's hiring was inspired.
     "Sid has been the key factor in the success and growth of the program," Oliver wrote in Kaufman's 1979 citation for Honorary Membership in SEG. It is doubtful COCORP could have been activated at all, much less so quickly and with such immediate results, had not Kaufman come to Cornell as its midwife. His personality, training in classical physics, contacts in the oil and gas industry, and expertise in seismic exploration were all needed to get the project beyond the tenuous birthing stage. Equally valuable was Kaufman's aggressive skill in eliminating snarls, theoretical or bureaucratic.

     Oliver, department chairman from 1971-81 and now Irving Porter Church professor, says: "I don't know if I've ever seen anyone who can focus his mind on one thing as completely as Sid. When he's really concentrating on something, you'd better either jump on the bandwagon and help, or get out of the way."
     COCORP blossomed into a vibrant adolescence soon after Kaufman's arrival. Its first field work was done within 15 months; within two years, it was emerging as a National Science Foundation showpiece; and at the end of three it was fully mature, i.e., able to keep a contract seismic crew in the field 12 months a year.
     Few anticipated this quick success. In 1974 no one was certain reflection techniques could recover quality data at depths greater than a few seconds. Kaufman, though, had long been a true believer. In 1941 he got reflections at 5-6 seconds, astonishing for the time. "I was told to forget about it because they were of no interest to industry. At the time 9,000 feet was considered an ultra-deep well."

     Kaufman retains the 1941 calculations. They're arresting not only in their prescience but in the clean lines of the work. This is obviously superlative craftsmanship, which though now outdated technologically will remain interesting for its artistry and beauty, just as a 19th Century master clocksmith's it, even though inferior to the modern machine-struck digital.
     The old lines convinced Kaufman the basic idea was sound. "No one could be certain the technique would work until we had actually done it, but I had no qualms," he says. "There was nothing that said it absolutely couldn't be done."
     State-of-the-art evidence, however, was needed to persuade NSF to fund field work. Kaufman foraged the petroleum industry, where he had many friends, for signs of deep reflections. "The oil companies cooperated fully. They gave me everything they had. One geophysicist, when I was visiting his office, got right up, cut off the bottom half of a section, and handed it to me. That kind of data was critical. It let me go to the NSF and show them we had a fighting chance."

     The NSF did not immediately marry itself to COCORP but was definitely intrigued and willing to be courted. It agreed to back three field projects. The Cornell leadership picked the sites with great care. (The original members of the consortium were the University of Houston, the University of Wisconsin, Princeton and Cornell. The latter has always had operational responsibility.)
     "We figured two of the three had to be successful or we'd be out of business," Kaufman says. "We did everything we could to make sure our first work was in areas with the best odds."
     COCORP easily passed the make-or-break crisis. All three tests were successful, two spectacularly. The first, in March 1975, was in Hardeman County, Texas, midway between Amarillo and Wichita Falls, an area thought rather placid geologically but where oil prospectors had gotten reflections from great depths. The results vindicated the COCORP faithful. Reflections were recorded as deep as 43 kilometers, and unexpectedly some interesting geology was picked up as a bonus.
     "We got reflections at 15-16 seconds in Hardeman County. That amazed people. But we weren't doing magic. Fundamentally we were merely using the techniques developed by the industry. The only thing new was that we were doing it deeper. Industry usually cuts it off after the first few seconds because that's all they're interested in."

     Even more exciting data came from the third shoot, in central New Mexico - December 1975. Reflections were recorded from 51 kilometers and the data apparently revealed, at a depth of 21 kilometers, a magma chamber some geologists believe responsible for the area's strong uplift. This alone could be a valuable scientific and commercial spinoff of the main research thrust. Oliver says:
     "The magma accumulations have an obvious potential as a source of geothermal heat. And you want to know if there's likelihood they will evolve into full-fledged volcanoes with surface eruptions. But it's possible that magma bodies have other important roles in the earth's crust. This heat may be a major factor in concentrating important minerals and metalliferous ores in the zones immediately above them. The same could also be true for the formation of petroleum - you need just the right amount of heat to turn organic material into hydrocarbons.
     "From the purely scientific standpoint, which is our chief interest, there is a feeling that the intrusion of magmas may play a significant role in building the continental crust. These vertical intrusions could be a key factor, and we would like to know quite a bit more about them, for the current version of the evolving theory of plate tectonics may not be telling us the whole story of the earth's geological processes."

     After this flying start, COCORP grew exponentially. Today their annual budget is around $3 million. Their in-house computer works 24 hours a day, seven days a week, crunching out elephantine sections which make arabesques of entire corridors.
     "We operate just like a small oil company," says Kaufman. "The only difference is that we don't drill because we're not looking for oil or gas - we're looking for knowledge of the earth. We decide where we're going, get permission, hire the crews, do the quality control, test the data, do all the processing, draw up the final sections and interpret.
     "Nowhere else in the United States are students able to do this. We take them through the entire exploration process. They love it. They feel as if they're doing something scientific that's also connected to the real world."

     Kaufman was an early and vigorous campaigner for this business-like approach - especially for the use of contract seismic crews. He felt the modern equipment, expertise, and cost-effectiveness of professional crews would yield the highest quality data faster and cheaper than crews gathered from the academic community which would constantly have to be reconstructed and retrained.
     Industry and academic are frequent antagonists, but this partnership (chiefly with Petty-Ray which has done the contract field work since the start of the project) has been harmonious, the amiability undoubtedly due to the respect Kaufman commands in both camps.
     The approach has unquestionably been a major factor in COCORP's rapid growth. With a professional crew collecting data 12 months a year and Cornell-based geophysicists specializing almost entirely on processing and interpretation, little effort is wasted, duplicated, or has to be redone because of gross error. And the constant intellectual probings of the data in the scholastic environment, where commercial restraints are irrelevant, yield fresh interpretation of interest to both the scientific purist and the most profit-minded entrepreneur.
     "COCORP has changed geological thinking. We've made some discoveries that were unthought of before," Kaufman says. "The evidence we've gotten that there are reflecting structures at great depths disturbs a lot of people who think it should be homogeneous down there. Every time we go somewhere and learn something, half the geologic community is very, very happy and half is very, very sad.
     "And certainly, our results have affected oil company geologists' thinking in their own patch. We're not looking for petroleum but we've come across areas where there might be some. The oil companies are definitely interested. Over 100 are sending orders for the data. It's available for the printing costs. I know the names of more oil companies now than I did when I was in the business."

     COCORP's two most spectacularly successful investigations, in Wind River, Wyoming, and southern Appalachia, are examples where both the geological theorist and wildcatter have benefited. The Wyoming work was done in an area that has been one of America's hottest petroleum plays, and consequently one of the most analyzed. Just as a consensus was emerging that the Wind River range had been pushed up from below, COCORP published findings that a more likely cause was a convergence of lateral forces.
     In Appalachia, COCORP's work indicated the mountains are underlain by horizontal layers, several kilometers thick, of younger sedimentary or sedimentary-like material. This supports the theory that horizontal thrusting can move immense amounts of crust great distances, and bolsters the concept that continents grow by adding slices of material at the edges. Additionally, this data indicates that current estimates of petroleum reserves may have to be altered upward. It implies that huge sedimentary basins, perhaps petroleum-bearing, are as yet unexplored because they've been masked by metamorphic overburden.

     The National Science Board of the NSF said in its 12th annual report, Only One Science:
     
     "What COCORP researchers have learned in Appalachia has staggered the field of geology. The knowledge is revolutionizing concepts regarding the formation and development of such mountain belts as the Appalachians and the Ouachitas. Geologists and geophysicists are excited by the possibility that such thrust faults may be more common than had been believed.
     "It is important that COCORP expand to test other regions with new hypotheses developed during the Appalachian work ... As a result of COCORP, several oil companies have sent seismic crews to the Piedmont area in hopes of finding oil and gas ... The findings of COCORP have suggested that portions of the United States previously considered barren may contain badly needed oil and gas."

     Explorationists may also benefit from the innovative data manipulation COCORP has had to do. Graduate student Barton Payne, a self-described computer monkey, says: "It violates accepted rules every day. The oil companies work mostly in basins where the standard theory works pretty well. But at great depths that usually is not the case. We have to invent a lot of it as we go along."
     When, and if, explorationists seriously consider prospecting at ultra-deep levels, much of the necessary modification of seismic theory may already be far advanced.
     By the end of 1982, COCORP had shot 4,280 kilometers of seismic. Its staff had swelled, in academic terms, to division strength - three faculty (full professors Kaufman and Oliver, plus assistant professor Larry Brown, 20% of the department with professorial rank), a complement of full-time computer technicians, five post-doctoral assistants, and 17 graduate students.
     The work more than justifies the emphasis. Don Turcotte, new department chairman, says: "What has propelled us into a position of national eminence is the COCORP program."

     Impressive proof of its prominence in modern geophysical research is the ever-growing number of imitators around the world. Currently, eight countries have COCORP clones in the field or in the advanced planning stages. The first international symposium on studies of the continental crust by reflection profiling will be held at Cornell in June, 1984.
     Kaufman would like to have more graduate students. However, Cornell's severe space limitations (one room has 10 desks jaw-to-jaw) prevents any increase. That will ease when the department moves into a $12.5-million building now under construction. The new structure, expected to open in the fall of 1984, will nearly double the working space.
     The shift to first-class facilities will conclude COCORP's first evolutionary stage. The next steps promise even more important information for theorists. The project is following a traditional research scenario - as more and more is discovered, the parameters and possibilities increase. "Every time we go somewhere, we ask more and more questions," Kaufman says.
     This evolving intellectual challenge implies COCORP and its foreign counterparts will be the key geophysical research project of the immediate future - the one providing the basic data spawning the next breakthrough in earth-science theory, just as marine research a generation back ignited the plate-tectonics revolution.

     Kaufman's diligence and inspiration over the past decade have made such a quantum leap possible, perhaps inevitable. It is a perfect culmination to an exemplary career. Under his direction, COCORP has lifted its data-gathering, processing, and interpretative techniques to high levels and developed a solid government-industry-academia relationship. It has been firmly established as technologically feasible, of immediate use scientifically and commercially, and of an even more significant future. (Oliver thinks there might be at least 50 years' work remaining.)