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The marine vibrator

Industrial Vehicles International, Tulsa, Oklahoma, U.S.

Corresponding author: ivi@indvehicles.com

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

As the geophysical industry enters the 21st century, it is undergoing several fundamental changes. One challenge involves the requirement to perform marine surveys in ways that are less intrusive to the environments in which we operate. Many oil and gas producing areas in shallow water and transition zones remain unsurveyed as a result of environmental restrictions. In the United States the Marine Mammal Protection Act is now raising issues regarding operations of conventional air-gun source vessels. These kinds of challenges are not new to our industry. An early Conoco land vibrator crew made possible a survey in Los Angeles when dynamite was thought the only solution. The concept of using swept signal sources as a more environmentally friendly alternative to impulse sources is a solution that our industry has been familiar with for a long time. This article contends that a similar solution for marine environments already exists—the marine vibrator.

The swept signal source generates an amplitude output spread over several seconds. The impulsive source releases its output in milliseconds, not seconds. As a result of this fundamentally different approach, the impulsive source will project higher instantaneous pressures than the swept signal source. Yet, as we know when we compare land vibrators to dynamite, the data results can be considered reasonably similar. In the marine environment, the situations are different but comparable. As a result of the introduction by . . . [Full Text of this Article]