Distributed Acoustic Sensing for Surface Seismic: Case Study from Mineral Exploration

Summary To this day, DAS has been mostly utilised for borehole seismology and not much for land acquisition. This can be attributed to several reasons: not ideal coupling and the directional sensitivity of the optic fibres. Herein, we present a case study of use of DAS for 2D land seismic for mineral exploration, where we try to answer some of the questions related to the feasibility of using DAS for surface land seismic. The main advantages of DAS for surface seismic include: much faster deployment than traditional geophone systems resulting in big cost savings, much denser spatial sampling resulting among others to higher fold and non-aliased wavefields, and superior images. Some of the potential shortcomings include lack of sensitivity to waves polarised perpendicular to the fibre, which can result in very weak refracted waves and thus need to use auxiliary geophones for refraction static corrections.