Extracting 3D Information from 2D Crooked Line Seismic Data on Hardrock Environments

Sammanfattning: Seismic methods have been used in sedimentary environment for almost 80 years. During that time, exploration geophysicists have developed a number of techniques to handle specific aspects of working in sedimentary areas. This is not the case for studies in the hardrock environment, where significantly less time and money have been invested on seismic investigations. Therefore, there is still a need to develop the right techniques appropriate for working in hardrock environments. The research presented here, covers aspects of acquisition, processing and interpretation in hardrock environments. A cost-effective alternative for two-dimensional data acquisition is presented. Acquisition parameters are also discussed and recommendations for future work are given. The main effort of this thesis, however, was to find appropriate processing methods to address some of the different problems present in datasets acquired in the hardrock environment. Comparison of two computer programs for first arrival seismic tomography was performed in order to find the most suitable one for processing crooked line geometries. Three-dimensional pre-stack depth migration was also tested to find a detailed near-surface image. A processing method geared to enhance the signal-to-noise ratio was applied to the dataset with the lowest signal amplitudes to improve the quality of the stack. Finally, cross-dip analysis and corrections were performed on two of the three datasets included in this thesis. Cross-dip analysis was also applied as an interpretation tool to provide the information needed for estimation of the true dip of some of the reflectors related to geological structures. The results presented in this thesis indicate that cross-dip analysis and corrections are one of the most powerful tools for processing and interpretation in the presence of complex geology. Therefore, it is recommended to include this method as a standard step in the processing and interpretation sequence of data acquired in hardrock environments.