Introduction To April Focus: Land Seismic

The papers in this section on Land Seismic were inspired by the Land Seismic Workshop in Banff, September 23 to 25, 2014. The workshop was jointly held by the CSEG and the EAGE, and the technical sessions included as much discussion time as presentation time. Our vision was to collect explorationists, researchers, and service providers together to discuss The Conventional Future: Complex Reservoir Challenges in Frontier Land Basins.

The venue was The Banff Centre, which is an artist’s retreat on Tunnel Mountain. On the east side of the Rockies, Banff is near the leading edge of deformation for our mountain front, so the views of nearby mountains include folds and faults, as well as fractured carbonate formations that are analogous to reservoir rocks at depth. We could not have found a more inspiring or fitting venue for the topic at hand.

The one paper in this session that was not presented during the workshop was by Gijs Vermeer, but his manuscript fit so well into our focus issue on Land Seismic. Even though Dr. Vermeer didn’t attend the workshop, his contributions to the science of land seismic acquisition arose during the discussion periods to support or contrast one point or another.

So, the first paper in this focus issue is “On the use of coincident shots and receivers in Megabin geometry and in orthogonal geometry”, by Gijs Vermeer. In classic Vermeer fashion, he ties together other recent RECORDER publications in his analysis and provides further insights into these recent publications. I know very few people who, through his style of writing, can capture the essence of an interactive workshop in a paper publication.

The second paper was by one of the invited guests at the workshop, Hector Alfonso, entitled, “The advantages of applying cableless technology: a case study in Colombia”. Hector was the first speaker of the workshop, and we leveraged his energy to kick-start the discussion on seismic acquisition in difficult areas. His manuscript on cableless technology makes a strong case for acquiring seismic free of cables in difficult terrain.

Next we have “Seismic exploration in extreme topography: acquisition for optimal imaging”, where Mike Hall, Peter Maxwell, and Anna Leslie continue to address the problems of imaging in extreme topography, from the perspective of seismic imaging. Mike’s focus on imaging issues helped create a bridge between the acquisition presentations and processing talks.

As the workshop transitioned – like our seismic data – from acquisition to processing, we had an interesting perspective on problem-solving through refraction- statics issues presented by Liansheng Liu. “An integrated strategy: constrained tomography inversion of multi-type data for near surface velocity model building” by Liu and his co-authors Lidong Gao and Zhiyu Zhang is the fourth focus article.

We finish up this section with a paper on seismic imaging, entitled, “CRS azimuth gathers and CRS shot gathers for improved fault imaging in Alpine 3D seismic data”, by Henning Trappe, Eliakim Schuenemann, Juergen Pruessmann, Sonja Suckro, Hans-Gert Linzer, and Martin Schachinger. It was ably presented by Sonja Suckro, whose talk instigated discussion around irregular acquisition as well as imaging.