Hunting reflections in Papua New Guinea: early processing results

David C. Henley, Han-xing Lu

Papua New Guinea is among the most notoriously difficult areas in the world in which to acquire usable seismic reflection data. The rugged, forested terrain makes it very difficult to deploy both sources and sensors; and the complex near-surface layers contribute to serious coherent noise and statics on the resulting recorded seismic traces. Furthermore, the underlying geological structure is known to be complex, as well, adding to the difficulty of obtaining interpretable images. We show here some preliminary processing attempts, applied to a 2D-3C seismic line from Papua New Guinea, which may ultimately help to image reflections in these very challenging data.