Improving efficiency in land seismic acquisition

摘要

New methodologies reduce cost, improve data quality. Periodically technological breakthroughs in a particular segment of the industry seem to come fast and furious despite the industry's reputation for being slow to try new things. Land seismic acquisition could be said to have experienced this type of renaissance in the past few years. While efficiencies in marine seismic acquisition can be as simple as adding more streamers to the back of a boat, land is a different animal. The conventional procedure for a 3-D survey is to lay out a grid of receivers according to a survey design, shake the ground with vibrators or dynamite sources to activate the source, record the resulting seismic waves, then pick up the whole mess and move it to the next location. Noise issues have prevented any type of simultaneous sweeping, and adding to the inefficiency has been the sheer bulk of the cables and geophones, which often need to be deployed in very inhospitable terrain.