The south-western Barents Sea is characterized by a complex geological regime with a heterogeneous overburden. A key challenge in producing an accurate image of the subsurface lies in creating a velocity model which describes the recorded data well. Refraction-based Full Waveform Inversion (FWI) has become the standard tool for high-resolution velocity model building in the Barents Sea. Nevertheless, due to the lack of recorded long offsets, model depths have been limited to the shallow overburden in the past.
In 2018 PGS and TGS utilized a novel acquisition setup for acquiring an ultra high density 3D seismic dataset in the Barents Sea, covering parts of the Hammerfest Basin and Finnmark Platform. In addition to 16 densely spaced streamers, three streamers were extended from 7 km to 10 km length, allowing the recording of deeper diving waves (refractions) and thereby enabling FWI to produce velocity updates to greater depths.
Seismic Foldout from the Barents Sea: Finnmark Platform to the Hammerfest Basin
Seismic section (initial fast track Kirchhoff prestack depth migration) extending from the Finnmark Platform in the southwest into the Hammerfest Basin in the north-east. The initial depth migrated fast track data shows clear improvements in resolution and structural imaging compared to vintage data available in this complex area.
This seismic section was taken from GEO ExPro Vol. 16, Issue No. 3. You can download the article from our technical library.
You can read the whole story in our technical library, or explore the exploration challenge and the innovative solution in our recent case study: Nearer, Denser, Longer