Get to the Point – Seismic Data Acquisition for Full-wave Imaging

Since the earliest use of seismic data in hydrocarbon exploration, geophysicists have primarily concerned themselves with the apparent direction and speed with which the waves travelled through the earth. They effectively focused on the P-waves and treated the shear and near-surface waves as noise that need to be removed.<br>Full-wave imaging questions this conventional approach, as geophysicists now realise that a rock particle’s behaviour when a seismic wave passes it reveals new information about the subsurface. This is in part due to the fact that the rock particles do not necessarily appear to move neither in the same direction nor with the same velocity as the passing wave.