• journal_title：The Leading Edge
• Contributor：Amal Ray ; Bertram Noltem ; Don Herron
• Publisher：Society of Exploration Geophysicists
• Date：2005-
• Format：text/html
• Language：en
• Identifier：10.1190/1.1901395
• journal_abbrev：The Leading Edge
• issn：1070-485X
• volume：24
• issue：4
• firstpage：410
• section：Special section: Offshore

We describe an experimental four-component (4C) nodal ocean-bottom seismic (OBS) survey that was conducted in 2001 at Thunder Horse Field in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico—in fact, the water depth of 6000 ft makes this, to our knowledge, the deepest-water OBS survey shot by industry to date. The goal of this survey was to investigate the technical feasibility of deepwater OBS surveys, which hold the promise of improved imaging due to the wide-azimuth nature of the data. We present the results from prestack depth migration of these OBS data and compare them to an image computed from towed-streamer data. The results lead us to conclude that deepwater OBS is feasible and may be a powerful technology for future deepwater imaging projects.