Progress and prospects of seismic oceanography

Abstract Seismic oceanography has the advantages of high resolution, fast acquisition and the availability large amounts of legacy data. Almost 20 years of studies of seismic oceanography allowed the following progress: 1) high-resolution imaging of various oceanic features such as mesoscale/sub-mesoscale eddies, internal waves/solitary waves, oceanic fronts, thermohaline staircases etc; 2) the setup of a series of quantitative methods which include thermohaline structure inversion, internal wave wave-number spectra estimation, turbulence dissipation rate estimation and current velocity calculation; 3) detailed studies of seafloor processes; 4) high potential of simultaneous seismic oceanography and physical Oceanography investigations. Main prospects for near future include: 1) higher resolution seismic acquisition, further exploiting of 3D and prestack data/time-lapse data; 2) more detailed studies of submesoscale oceanic features; 3) expected new results on submarine current flow-topography interactions, and seafloor processes.