Making Waves — Towards a New Era of Seismic Recording Equipment

Abstract

Seismic recording equipment engineering and manufacturing has experienced an evolutionary change in the past 20 years. In addition to great strides in channel count and flexibility, the cost per channel has also dropped steadily. Seismic contractors utilizing modern equipment can economically shoot in virtually any region that can be accessed with little or no lasting impact on the land and at the same time the quality and utility of the recorded data has increased inversely to the cost.

These evolutionary strides are supported by higher channel counts; lighter more flexible equipment and advances in source technology including operational strategies which produce 20,000 or more source points in a single day of shooting. The growing trend of high density single point sources combined with single point sensors is yielding high fold data of unprecedented quality.

This presentation will explore the more recent advances in seismic equipment development and the operational changes they have enabled to deliver this evolutionary change in the quality and cost of seismic data.