Making Old Data Almost New: Procedures for Identifying and Correcting Problems in Legacy Seismic Data

Historic seismic data provide a wealth of geological information to the academic community. These data very often contain coordinate system and navigation file problems. The navigation file problems can often be easily solved as long as one is aware that these problems exist and their cause. An example is shown here where the order of the coordinates in the SEGY header were corrected. This removed “distortions” in the seismic section and resulted in the clear imaging of strong reflectors. These basic steps to improve the data quality should be taken before thought is given to reprocessing the data which can be time consuming. As more and more students are given the task of interpreting these data, there is a need to highlight these problems and come up with a standard procedure for correcting them. Here we provide this basic outline, along with YouTube videos detailing the procedure.