Imaging of thrust structures under Colombian foothills landscape through Marchenko approach

Abstract

The Marchenko imaging approach successfully deals with multiple scattering during seismic migration, obtaining clear images in structurally complex geological zones below at a specific depth. Through the Marchenko equation, the method retrieves Green's function of a virtual source in profundity using reflections recorded on the surface and a smoothed velocity model. According to the theorem of reciprocity, Green's function represents the medium's response to a source on the surface recorded by a virtual receiver in-depth and decomposes it into a down-going wavefield and an up-going wavefield. Both wave fields' deconvolution provides the reflection response of virtual sources and virtual receivers repositioned in the subsurface, mimicking redatumming. The result is an image free of multiple internal reflections from the area below virtual both sources and receivers. After successfully testing with synthetic seismograms generated in a plane-horizontal layers model, we applied the Marchenko algorithm to seismic data of the Upper Magdalena Valley project using an available velocity model. Compared to an image supplied by a Kirchhoff pre-stack depth migration algorithm, the new image correctly positions the seismic events avoiding misleading interpretations in locating complex structures.