3 ms·

I currently work at an exploration geophysics firm and was just talking to my boss about this yesterday. His comment was that data acquisition had an arms race

I currently work at an exploration geophysics firm and was just talking to my boss about this yesterday. His comment was that data acquisition had an arms race to the bottom in the late 80s and has become complete commodity object. This has results in data from the 80s through today being no different as they're still using the (mostly) same tools and techniques. There is no incentive to better your seismic surveying since stuff from the 80s is "good enough" for all the processing shops.

angrygoat 9y ago
Yep, that sounds about right, at least on the data formats. A survey now is gathering orders of magnitude more data than it would have in the 80s (especially 3d/4d surveys), but I guess the formats didn't really need to change. I don't miss writing code to guess whether a file has traces encoded in IBM floating point or IEEE; or handling SEG-Y headers which ought to be EBCDIC but are sometimes ASCII :-)