CAPITULO 3

3. ELEMENTS OF SEISMIC SURVEYING

3.1 INTRODUCTION
In seismic surveying, seismic waves are created by a con-trolled source and propagate through
the subsurface. Some waves will return to the surface after refraction or reflection at geological
boundaries within the subsur-face. Instruments distributed along the surface detect the ground
motion caused by these returning waves and hence measure the arrival times of the waves at
different ranges from the source. These travel times may be con-verted into depth values and,
hence, the distribution of subsurface geological interfaces may be systematically mapped.

Seismic surveying was first carried out in the early 1920s. It represented a natural development
of the already long-established methods of earthquake seis-mology in which the travel times of
earthquake waves recorded at seismological observatories are used to de-rive information on the
internal structure of the Earth. Earthquake seismology provides information on the gross internal
layering of the Earth, and measurement of the velocity of earthquake waves through the various
Earth layers provides information about their physical properties and composition. In the same
way, but on a smaller scale, seismic surveying can provide a clear and detailed picture of
subsurface geology. It undoubtedly represents the single most important geophysical survey-ing
method in terms of the amount of survey activity and the very wide range of its applications.
Many of the principles of earthquake seismology are applicable to seismic surveying. However,
the latter is concerned solely with the structure of the Earth down to tens of kilometres at most
and uses artificial seismic sources, such as explosions, whose location, timing and source
characteristics are, unlike earthquakes, under the direct control of the geophysicist. Seismic
surveying also uses specialized recording systems and associated data pro-cessing and
interpretation techniques.
3.2 STRESS AND STRAIN
When external forces are applied to a body, balanced in-ternal forces are set up within it. Stress
is a measure of the intensity of these balanced internal forces.The stress act-ing on an area of any
surface within the body may be re-solved into a component of normal stress perpendicular to the
surface and a component of shearing stress in the plane of the surface. At any point in a stressed
body three orthogonal planes can be defined on which the components of stress are wholly normal
stresses, that is, no shearing stresses act along them. These planes define three orthogonal axes
At any point in a stressed body three orthogonal planes can be defined on which the components
of stress are wholly normal stresses, that is, no shearing stresses act along them. These planes
define three orthogonal axes.
If the principal stresses are all of equal magnitude within a body the condition of stress is said to
be hydro-static, since this is the state of stress throughout a fluid body at rest.A fluid body cannot
sustain shearing stresses (since a fluid has no shear strength), hence there cannot be shear stresses
in a body under hydrostatic stress. If the principal stresses are unequal, shearing stresses exist
along all surfaces within the stressed body, except for the three orthogonal planes intersecting in
the principal axes.
A body subjected to stress undergoes a change of shape and/or size known as strain. Up to a
certain limit-ing value of stress, known as the yield strength of a ma-terial, the strain is directly
proportional to the applied stress (Hooke’s Law). This elastic strain is reversible so that removal
of stress leads to a removal of strain. If the yield strength is exceeded the strain becomes non-
linear and partly irreversible (i.e. permanent strain results), and this is known as plastic or ductile
strain. If the stress is in-creased still further the body fails by fracture.
3.3 SEISMIC WAVES
Seismic waves are parcels of elastic strain energy that propagate outwards from a seismic source
such as an earthquake or an explosion. Sources suitable for seismic surveying usually generate
short-lived wave trains, known as pulses, that typically contain a wide range of frequencies, as
explained in Section 2.3. Except in the immediate vicinity of the source, the strains associated
with the passage of a seismic pulse are minute and may be assumed to be elastic. On this
assumption the propaga-tion velocities of seismic pulses are determined by the elastic moduli and
densities of the materials through which they pass.There are two groups of seismic waves, body
waves and surface waves.
3.3.1 BODY WAVES
Body waves can propagate through the internal volume of an elastic solid and may be of two
types. Compressional waves (the longitudinal, primary or P-waves of earth-quake seismology)
propagate by compressional and dila-tional uniaxial strains in the direction of wave travel. Particle
motion associated with the passage of a com-pressional wave involves oscillation, about a fixed
point, in the direction of wave propagation (Fig. 3.3(a)). Shear waves (the transverse, secondary
or S-waves of earth-quake seismology) propagate by a pure shear strain in a direction
perpendicular to the direction of wave travel. Individual particle motions involve oscillation,
about a fixed point, in a plane at right angles to the direction of wave propagation (Fig. 3.3(b)). If
all the particle oscilla-tions are confined to a plane, the shear wave is said to be plane-polarized.
3.3.2 SURFACE WAVES
In a bounded elastic solid, seismic waves known as sur-face waves can propagate along the
boundary of the solid. Rayleigh waves propagate along a free surface, or along the boundary
between two dissimilar solid media, the associated particle motions being elliptical in a plane
perpendicular to the surface and containing the direc-tion of propagation (Fig. 3.4(a)). The orbital
particle motion is in the opposite sense to the circular particle motion associated with an
oscillatory water wave, and is therefore sometimes described as retrograde. A further major
difference between Rayleigh waves and oscilla-tory water waves is that the former involve a shear
strain and are thus restricted to solid media. The amplitude of Rayleigh waves decreases
exponentially with distance below the surface. They have a propagation velocity lower than that
of shear body waves and in a homoge-neous half-space they would be non-dispersive. In prac-
tice, Rayleigh waves travelling round the surface of the Earth are observed to be dispersive, their
waveform un-dergoing progressive change during propagation as a re-sult of the different
frequency components travelling at different velocities. This dispersion is directly attribut-able to
velocity variation with depth in the Earth’s interior.Analysis of the observed pattern of dispersion
of earthquake waves is a powerful method of studying the velocity structure of the lithosphere
and asthenosphere (Knopoff 1983). The same methodology, applied to the surface waves
generated by a sledgehammer, can be used to examine the strength of near-surface materials for
civil engineering investigations.
If the surface is layered and the surface layer shear wave velocity is lower than that of the
underlying layer, a second set of surface waves is generated. Love waves are polarized shear
waves with a particle motion parallel to the free surface and perpendicular to the direction of wave
propagation (Fig. 3.4(b)). The velocity of Love waves is intermediate between the shear wave
velocity of the surface layer and that of deeper layers, and Love waves are inherently dispersive.
The observed pattern of Love wave dispersion can be used in a similar way to Rayleigh wave
dispersion to study the subsurface structure.
3.3.3 WAVES AND RAYS
A seismic pulse propagates outwards from a seismic source at a velocity determined by the
physical proper-ties of the surrounding rocks. If the pulse travels through a homogeneous rock it
will travel at the same velocity in all directions away from the source so that at any subse-quent
time the wavefront, defined as the locus of all points which the pulse has reached at a particular
time, will be a sphere. Seismic rays are defined as thin pencils of seismic energy travelling along
ray paths that, in isotropic media, are everywhere perpendicular to wavefronts (Fig. 3.5).
3.4 SEISMIC WAVE VELOCITIES OF ROCKS
By virtue of their various compositions, textures (e.g. grain shape and degree of sorting),
porosities and con-tained pore fluids, rocks differ in their elastic moduli and densities and, hence,
in their seismic velocities. Informa-tion on the compressional and shear wave velocities, vp and
vs, of rock layers encountered by seismic surveys is important for two main reasons: firstly, it is
necessary for the conversion of seismic wave travel times into depths; secondly, it provides an
indication of the lithology of a rock or, in some cases, the nature of the pore fluids contained
within it.
To relate rock velocities to lithology, the assumption that rocks are uniform and isotropic in
structure must be reviewed. A typical rock texture can be regarded as having mineral grains
making up most of the rock (the matrix), with the remaining volume being occupied by void
space (the pores). The fractional volume of pore space is the porosity (f) of the rock. For
simplicity it may be assumed that all the matrix grains have the same physical properties. This
is a surprisingly good approxi-mation since the major rock-forming minerals, quartz, feldspar
and calcite, have quite similar physical proper-ties. In this case, the properties of the bulk rock
will be an average of the properties of the matrix minerals and the pore fluid, weighted
according to the porosity.The sim-plest case is for the density of a rock, where the bulk density
rb can be related to the matrix and pore fluid densities (rm, rf ): r b = r f f + (1 - f ) rm

The following empirical findings of velocity studies are noteworthy:

1. Compressional wave velocity increases with confin-ing pressure (very
rapidly over the first 100 MPa).
2. Sandstone and shale velocities show a systematic increase with depth of
burial and with age, due to the combined effects of progressive compaction and
cementation.
3. For a wide range of sedimentary rocks the compres-sional wave velocity is
related to density, and well-established velocity–density curves have been
published (Sheriff & Geldart 1983; see Section 6.9, Fig. 6.16). Hence, the
densities of inaccessible subsurface layers may be predicted if their velocity is
known from seismic surveys.
4. The presence of gas in sedimentary rocks reduces the elastic moduli,
Poisson’s ratio and the vp/vs ratio. vp/vs ra-tios greater than 2.0 are characteristic
of unconsolidated sand, whilst values less than 2.0 may indicate either a
consolidated sandstone or a gas-filled unconsolidated sand. The potential value
of vs in detecting gas-filled sediments accounts for the current interest in shear
wave seismic surveying.