Before anyone digs a hole to find oil, gas, or minerals, someone has to see what is under the ground. That is the job of seismic imaging, the process of turning sound waves into pictures of the subsurface. It is the quiet first step in nearly every resource discovery, and it is the technical heart of Jim Rickards’s “$150 Trillion Birthright” presentation.

Rickards, a former general counsel at Long-Term Capital Management, best-selling author on currency and geopolitics, and editor of model Press’s Strategic Intelligence letter, argues that President Trump “opened 650 million acres of federal land containing an estimated $150 trillion in buried minerals” and that mining companies will be “legally required to find the exact location of these mineral deposits BEFORE they can dig a single hole.” His pitch says three small companies could dominate the discovery technology. To judge that claim, it helps to understand exactly how seismic imaging works.

How Seismic Imaging Works

Seismic imaging starts with a source of sound energy. On land that is often a vibrating truck; at sea it is an air gun towed behind a vessel. The sound travels down through the rock, and every time it crosses a boundary between different rock layers, part of it reflects back toward the surface. Sensors record those reflections, and powerful software reconstructs them into a three-dimensional image of what lies below.

That image is what geologists study to decide where to drill. A good seismic image can reveal the shape of a trap, the thickness of a reservoir, and whether a formation is likely to hold something valuable. The catch is that seismic imaging shows structure, not composition. It tells you where something might be, but not always what it is. Mineral deposits, in particular, often need additional geophysical and chemical work on top of seismic data before anyone is confident enough to drill.

The Equipment Behind the Image

The imaging business has two halves. One half is the equipment, the sensors and streamers that record the sound. The other is the processing, the software and computing that turn raw recordings into usable pictures. The Birthright picks span both.

“The Pioneer” is Geospace Technologies, a Houston-area maker of land and marine seismic equipment with about $116 million in trailing revenue. “The Innovator” is MIND Technology, which builds offshore seismic hardware under the Seamap brand, including the SeaLink streamer and the Sea Serpent passive arrays. “The Wildcat” is TGS ASA, the Norwegian energy-data firm from the 2023 TGS and PGS merger, which leans toward the data and processing side.

What the Pitch Gets Right and Wrong

The pick-and-shovel logic of the presentation is sound. Imaging companies get paid for the work of surveying, whether or not a client finds anything, which makes them a lower-risk way to play exploration. Rickards frames this correctly.

Where the pitch stretches is the mining link. Our teardown of the presentation found that these are oil and gas seismic companies whose revenue has tracked energy exploration budgets and the oil price for decades, not mineral discovery. The presentation’s claim that “the market for their services could explode from $2 billion to $100 billion over the next 12 months” does not match how federal leasing actually grows, which is gradually, on the order of one percent a year.

The Scoreboard Since the Tease

The presentation attached aggressive targets: “4,800% gain potential” for Geospace Technologies, “1,520% gain potential” for TGS ASA, and “4,340% gain potential” for MIND Technology. Since the June 24, 2025 catalyst came and went with no surge, Geospace Technologies is down 73.8% and MIND Technology down 56.8%, while TGS ASA is up 8.9%.

Seismic imaging is a real and durable technology, and it will matter for years whether or not any single promotional deadline pays off. For the adjacent themes, our deep-sea mining explainer and our AI mineral exploration coverage explore how the same techniques are used offshore and how software is changing discovery.

The offer behind the pitch is the Situation Report at $1,995 per year with no refunds. The technology is real, the mechanism is sound, and the specific stocks still deserve a careful, evidence-first read.

Imaging has also gotten cheaper and faster over the past two decades. Better sensors, faster processing, and more powerful computers mean a survey that once took months to interpret can now be turned around far more quickly. That is good for exploration and less good for pricing power, because the cost of the underlying imaging work keeps falling. The firms that have held up best are the ones that own proprietary data libraries or specialized hardware, not the ones selling a commodity processing service. That is a nuance the Birthright pitch does not spend much time on, but it shapes which of the three picks is actually durable.

None of this makes imaging any less essential. Every modern discovery still begins with a picture of the subsurface, and the companies that produce the clearest pictures at the lowest cost will keep finding customers. The point is simply that essential does not mean high-margin, and the pitch’s four-digit targets assume a pricing power these businesses do not currently have.

Ready to see the research? Click here to view the American Birthright presentation.

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