The power of high-effort seismic acquisition: the Longview experiment

David C. Henley, Malcolm B. Bertram, Kevin W. Hall, Henry C. Bland, Eric V. Gallant, Gary F. Margrave

Recent attempts have been made to reduce the "effort" involved in acquiring seismic data for exploration and development purposes by reducing the density of shots and receivers on the surface to that required only for properly imaging anticipated geological features with adequate lateral resolution. We show here, however, that there can be considerable benefits to actually increasing the acquisition density, particularly that of receivers. We recently conducted a carefully performed 1 km long 2D seismic survey east of Longview, Alberta using single geophones planted at 2.5 m intervals, with a mini-vibrator source applied at 5 m intervals. Using those data, we show that the fine spatial sampling enables not only superior coherent noise attenuation, but also significantly improves not only lateral resolution, but also vertical bandwidth, an unexpected result.