Seismic Imaging of Shallow Carbonate and Shale Hosted Massive Sulphide Deposits: A Feasibility Study

Seismic imaging of shallow sediment hosted massive sulphides has not been studied in detail. In this research two shallow sediment hosted massive sulphide deposits (one deeper and larger than the other) were modeled and synthetic seismic data generated using a 2D elastic wavefield finite difference code. F-k filtering can be used to attenuating surface waves (conventional processing). This requires small trace spacing so that spatially aliasing of energy is avoided. An alternative to this involves avoiding the surface wave using an optimum offset window technique. Both of these approaches, attenuation and avoidance, produce a high amplitude image of the deeper larger orebody. For the smaller, shallower orebody, conventional processing produced only a weak image of the orebody. However, there is a significant amount of shear wave energy from this target, and therefore multicomponent geophones should be used to capture this energy.