This article first appeared in AAPG Explorer, October 2024
With engineering improvements now expanding the scope of offshore exploration, can offshore seismic keep pace? So far, so good. Offshore geophysics has taken a step forward in the past decade. Not surprisingly, that development came from new data-processing capabilities, better algorithms and high-quality seismic interpretation. It came from broader bandwidth and improved lowfrequency seismic sources. Maybe a little surprisingly, it also came from a combination of supercomputers and satellites. Wadii El Karkouri is executive vice president for geophysical and energy data company TGS in Houston. He cited four areas responsible for the biggest recent advances in offshore seismic capability.