Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. Mahatma Gandhi
Marine seismic survey geometry superimposed on top of the city of Oslo. This picture serves to illustrate the main components and the size of a conventional 3D marine seismic acquisition system, referred to as the largest moving man-made object on Earth. The vessel tows two airgun source arrays with three sub-array strings in each (white lines). In 2010, seismic vessels typically towed in the order of 10 streamers (yellow lines), 6,000m long, with 100m separation between the streamers. Today, we are seeing a range of streamer spreads, formatted to optimise survey productivity. The most advanced vessels can deploy up to 24 streamers, 10 km in length. As the streamers get longer, the recording time for any one shot must also increase in order to capture the returning signal at the longer source-receiver offsets.
