A Purpose Built Ocean Bottom Seismic Node for Sparse Receiver Surveys

It is generally accepted, by the industry, that seabed receivers deliver superior seismic reflection measurements and that ROV deployed seabed receivers are the optimum methodology to ensure position repeatability and seafloor coupling consistency.

Recently, the industry has benefitted from the geometry flexibility of the seafloor node method to deliver ultra-long offset / full azimuth measurements, as an input to a velocity inversion. This velocity inversion solution has looser requirements in terms of receiver sampling, positioning to pre-plot and measurement type; and is consequently open to different, and more efficient, deployment and recovery solutions.

In this paper we review the design and some early testing of a prototype seafloor node, currently referred to as “Manta FreeDive”, that was designed primarily for collection of diving waves for velocity modelling. The driver for this effort is to understand the optimum combination of deployment method, coupling solution and sensor package for a node designed for sparse node acquisition.