Seeing through seismically difficult rocks unconventionally

Abstract

Two wide‐aperture, seismic profiles from traditionally poor‐record or no‐record areas are presented here—one acquired using an aperture of 12 km and the other acquired using an aperture of 9.6 km. Both seismic profiles were recorded with in‐line geometry in a common‐offset profiling mode. The wide‐aperture sections with an aperture of longer than 5 km are far superior in data quality to the conventional 5-km aperture sections, which rarely show any interpretable events in the deep zones of major exploration interest. The wide‐aperture recording technique can provide a viable alternative to conventional recording techniques in the poor‐record or no‐record terranes where the poor quality of conventional seismic data hampers exploration. Such poor‐record or no‐record areas commonly occur where upper layers of high seismic velocity overlie target layers of lower velocity.