First Break - Volume 7, Issue 9, 1989

Historically, the Gulf of Mexico was the cradle of the offshore oil industry, and specifications for marine seismic operations evolved to satisfy conditions to be found there. As the need to operate worldwide developed, especially in harsher northern waters, demands on equipment performance increased. However, equipment design has not always kept pace with changing demand, particularly for equipment which interfaces between the instrumentation and the ship.

The concept of pulling a complete seismic receiver array over land, instead of manually planting each geophone and connecting them to cables, is attractive both from a practical and economical point of view. Geophysical Service Inc. used this concept to collect seismic reflection data on the sea ice in Arctic North America in the 1970s (Einarsson et al.1977). A fairy detailed description of their system exists but no report of the performance was ever published.

The quantity of digital data which needs to be managed both in the field and in the processing centre causes handling and storage difficulties in the course of modern marine seismic acquisition and processing. Within the industry generally, the physical bulk of the recording medium has been reduced by use of the 6250-bpi computer tape format but this involves expensive tape drives and only goes part way to solving the problem in the field.