A HIGH RESOLUTION MARINE SEISMIC SURVEY *

Sub‐bottom profilers achieve high resolution but limited penetration beneath the seabed. Marine seismic surveys with long streamers and conventional sources suffer from an incomplete CDP stack and an unnecessarily low signal frequency in the early part of the section. Consequently there is a depth interval over which the optimum resolution of the seismic reflection method is not achieved. This paper describes the design, conduct, and results of an experimental survey made to obtain high resolution sections (predominant frequency about 200 Hz) with reflection times up to one second in the northern North Sea. The prime motivation for the experiment was to assess the possibility of mapping a shallow gas sand which had been encountered by the drillers.

The design concept of the survey was to keep all the benefits of conventional marine seismic data gathering and processing, but to reduce their dimensions and time scales by a factor of five to ten. The survey in 1972 recorded a total of twenty‐four lines using twenty‐four fold cover with 5 m spacing between the reflector points, and a separation of 50 m between adjacent lines. Multi‐electrode sparkers were used with a shallow purpose‐built twenty‐four channel 240 m hydrophone streamer. The recording sample interval was 1 ms. The final sections, obtained after conventional data processing, were of good quality. The results of velocity analysis helped to distinguish primary and multiple energy. Reflections with large negative reflection coefficients were seen in some parts of the survey area, and these are thought to indicate thin gas sands.