Current Status and Future Directions of Land Seismic Nodes

The land seismic industry is currently going through a technology replacement cycle. Nodal systems provide many geophysical, operational and cost advantages over cabled systems, and are overtaking the latter in most markets globally. The transition is well under way but, as with any innovation, the speed of adoption varies between customers and markets, and cabled systems remain the preference in some areas. Is this resistance to change due to organisational and human factors? Or are there legitimate technical challenges with nodal acquisition that must be addressed for wider adoption? Common concerns include: data quality, dataset completeness, reliability, remote instrument health QC, time synchronization of data, and handling of large data volumes.

We review these concerns and the technological maturity level of nodal systems, leveraging experience gained from manufacturing, delivering and supporting the use of over 750,000 land seismic nodes on more than 300 projects globally over the past five years.

We conclude that modern land seismic nodes have reached a high technical maturity level, and that a domain for further improvement is the timing in difficult GNSS environment, where a better clock solution could broaden even more the potential areas of application of the nodes.