3-D Depth Migration In the Diapir Province of the Central North Sea

A key factor in BP's recent diapir related discoveries in the Central North Sea has been the use of post-stack depth migration. Until recently this interative depth migration was performed on radial 2D data (Sugrue and Rockliff 1991). This produced good results, although the resulting image had all the inherent limitations of 2D data. However, with the recent implementation of a fast, accurate 3D depth migration algorithm on a massively parallel computer by Geco-Prakla (Highnam & Pieprzak 1991) it became possible to perform this iterative depth migration process in 3D. The following paper outlines the strategy adopted for building the velocity model and performing the migration.