Time Slicing the Cooper Basin

Abstract

An efficient and practical method of generating composite time slices using all available, non-confidential 3D seismic data recorded in the South Australian sector of the Cooper Basin has been developed. Twenty georeferenced tiff images of time slices between 1000 ms and 2900 ms at 100 ms intervals have been prepared and are intended to be made publicly available through the Department of State Development SARIG website. 2D seismic data has also been used in this project in an attempt to ‘fill in’ some of the gaps between 3D datasets. Forty eight 3D and 5076 2D seg-y data files were utilised in this project. All 3D and 2D segy files were scaled to normalise amplitude levels for gridding and imaging.

The ability to time slice 3D volumes of seismic seg-y data is a basic method employed in seismic interpretation. This method is usually applied to a single survey as commonly used software packages are not designed to view and analyse multiple 3D surveys at the same time or such functionality is not yet well implemented. For large scale regional interpretation, such constraint limits interpreting potential, especially in terms of basin wide correlation of main structural features.

Whilst the methodology developed in this project retains the quality and resolution inherent in the variety of surveys used, it provides a cost effective method of generating basin wide time slice images, compared to costly reprocessing required in merging of 3D data sets into one 3D volume.

The time slice data suite prepared complements other value-added regional datasets prepared by the Department of State Development to stimulate petroleum exploration in South Australia.