Can we image beneath salt?

Abstract

A decade has passed since petroleum geologists first recognized that Jurassic salt in the extensional Gulf of Mexico often appeared to be thrust between layers of younger sediments. Since then, many teams of geoscientists have been faced with the problems of either (1) improving subsalt quality through better data collection or (2) making subsalt interpretations from data of very poor quality. These problems aren’t new; in fact, they have faced the seismic industry from the beginning. In the Gulf of Mexico, however, the cause of the problem — salt — is obvious. In particular, high‐velocity, structurally contoured salt bodies act as sonic lenses that disperse or concentrate seismic signals in haphazard ways. Many advances in seismic imaging technology have been in response to these salt‐related problems of velocity and structure.