Paper Summary
The SEG Advances in Marine Seismic Data Acquisition Workshop was held virtually on September 7-9, attracting about 80 registered participants. 24 presentations were spread over three half-day timeframes and six sessions. I summarize key elements of the workshop content below. Topics covered included increased near-surface seismic resolution, time-lapse 3D (4D) seismic, towed streamer and ocean bottom node (OBN) sensor considerations, distributed acoustic sensor (DAS) fiber optics, reducing towed streamer survey cost by pragmatic compromises in survey design, reducing OBN survey cost with autonomous node designs, fundamentally-different approaches to spatial and/or spectral wavefield sampling, multi-source towed streamer case studies, and marine vibrator insights. Overall, it is clear that significant capital efforts are inevitably required over long timeframes to bring new acquisition concepts to fruition more so when the concepts represent a fundamental departure from traditional hardware platforms. Correspondingly, creative methods that repurpose traditional acquisition hardware and survey design templates can offer significant data improvements without necessitating expensive engineering development.