Understanding Seismic Anisotropy in Exploration and Exploitation

Understanding Seismic Anisotropy in Exploration and Exploitation, Second Edition by Leon Thomsen is designed to show you how to recognize the effects of anisotropy in your data and to provide you with the intuitive concepts that you will need to analyze it. Since its original publication in 2002, seismic anisotropy has become a mainstream topic in exploration geophysics. With the emergence of the shale resource play, the issues of seismic anisotropy have become central, because all shales are seismically anisotropic, whether fractured or not. With the advent of wide-azimuth surveying, it has become apparent that most rocks are azimuthally anisotropic, with P-wave velocities and P-AVO gradients varying with source-receiver azimuth. What this means is that analysis of such data with narrow-azimuth algorithms and concepts will necessarily fail to exploit this expensively acquired data. The issues include not only seismic wave propagation, but also seismic rock physics. Isotropic concepts including velocity, Young's modulus, and Poisson's ratio have no place in the discussion of anisotropic rocks, unless qualified in some directional way (e.g., vertical Young's modulus). Likewise, fluid substitution in anisotropic rocks, using the isotropic Biot/Gassmann formula, leads to formal errors, because the bulk modulus does not appear, in a natural way, within the anisotropic P-wave velocity. Updated in 2014, this edition addresses all contemporary concerns.