Evolvement of interpretation capacities of seismic measurements in mining of water-soluble minerals

Abstract

The current development level of geophysical methods for mining monitoring of water-soluble mineral deposits provides opportunities to control the growing variety of potentially hazardous geological and mining conditions, to identify the critical states of rock mass and to monitor the emergency facilities. Seismic surveys for solving the specified problems have proven to be a highly informative method for studying the structural features and properties of productive and waterprotective overburden strata, which has a high information richness of the recorded data. The main set of parameters for the interpretation stage of seismic exploration has been formed based on the experience in shallow seismic surveys within a potash deposit; it incl udes the target reflection times, effective and interval velocities, amplitudes, frequencies and a number of derivatives from these parameters. Improvement and adaptation of world interpretation practices in relation to the indicated seismic studies conditions provides means for increasing reliability of anomalies identification and expanding the set of typical wave ‘images’ for various kinds of inhomogeneities in a wide range of wave field realizations and its attributes. The analysis of irregular wave field component in the results of scattered waves processing, spectral decomposition and RGB-mixing is considered as an additional techniques of qualitative interpretation. An approach is proposed to determining possible fracturing in rock mass based on the variability of interval velocities. In combination with the AVO-analysis, this approach makes it possible to assess the trend of rock disintegration within the emergency facilities. The interpretation results of the areal (quasi-3D) and spatial (3D) detailed surveys of a shallow potash deposit are presented.