Oh, sorry I must have unintentionally misled you.  The plane table is used on the surface to provide locations of surface features (and these can include where, on the surface, there are hills, seeps etc).  Seismic surveys look down into the ground and give a picture of what the underground structures look like.  

Outside of the relatively local surveys done when one thinks there is an oilfield present, there is relatively little known of the rock beneath our feet.  I was going to post next about how we know where to look in the first place (gravimetric and magnetic surveys and the like) and they give a broader, though less detailed picture, and have been used much more extensively. But in most parts of the world the knowledge of the rock 100 ft below you is likely to be quite small, and such as it is, confined to relatively few folk.