Author: Mike Cline, T/X Resources
Do you have a new 3D seismic volume that you need to review quickly? Maybe you just need to scan it to get a feel for the structural trends, or for quickly finding new prospects to concentrate on.
Whatever the case, SMT’s VuPak Chair Cut Animation, a common method of seismic visualization, is a good approach to use for the evaluation. It allows for the simultaneous viewing of three different planes of seismic data, as seen in the image below—Inlines (vertical data surface facing forward), Crosslines (vertical data surface facing towards the left) and Time Slices (horizontal data surface, facing upwards).
The data set being displayed below is a Coherency volume, which is an excellent seismic attribute for highlighting subtle structural and stratigraphic changes in the data. In this case, we’re looking for the major fault trends. Seconds after opening the volume for viewing, we find that there are two significant faults surfaces (the dark purple, linear features being highlighted by the red arrows), which can be seen traversing through various faces of the cube of seismic data volume.
See the VuPak animation (25MB Media Player avi file).
Note: The avi file is fairly large, so it will take some time before the animation starts.
Author: Mike Cline, T/X Resources
Has this ever happend to you? Just as you are getting ready to plot a horizon/grid as a finished, color-filled map for an upcoming meeting (a short fuse of course), then you notice anomalous data ”spikes” and/or “black holes”, that really detract from the appearance (and credibility) of the map? Don’t feel too badly though, they aren’t always that obvious on most of these types of “flat” map displays—often seeming to appear out of nowhere.
To correct the map, you have to go through the tedious process of trying to find the bad data, fixing it, and then trying to recreate the display just as you had it earlier (with all of the same title block and scale info that you had before, but forgot to keep)? Arrgghhh……. There has got to be a better way!
See the VuPak animation (17MB Media Player avi file).
Note: The avi file is fairly large, so it will take some time before the animation starts.
Author: Mike Cline, T/X Resources
In this SMT VuPak 3D perspective display, only the largest 30% of the seismic troughs (negative amplitudes) have been selected. In conjunction with this amplitude extraction, the “Base of Channel” horizon, fault interpretation, along with the nearby wellbores have been selected for viewing. This results in an impressive cloud of large amplitudes, which exhibits a distinct, and channel-like sinuous character (red event, highlighted by yellow arrow), in close proximity with other controlling geologic features.
See the VuPak animation (18MB Media Player avi file), or see a larger Adobe Reader pdf file.
Note: The avi file is fairly large, so it will take some time before the animation starts.
Author: Mike Cline, T/X Resources
As a standard practice, interpreting seismic faults is done on vertical seismic displays (VSD). However, this can be problematic, and very time consuming, in a complexly-faulted area. For a correct interpretation, the initial fault interpretation picks must be connected properly. An easier, quicker, and more accurate method than using VSD’s for this, is to interpret faults in the horizontal domain.
See the VuPak animation (29MB Media Player avi file), or see larger Adobe Reader pdf file.
Note: The avi file is fairly large, so it will take some time before the animation starts.