ISBN:  Unavailable

Category: Unavailable

Page count: 246

The study aims to investigate the effect of vertical exaggeration on geological and tectonic interpretation on seismic images. The study considers what the effects are to the fault structures interpreted on seismic images after the effects of vertical exaggeration is removed. Seismic sections published in the last ten years were collected form the journals Basin Research, Marine and Petroleum Geology and Journal of Structural Geology. The dip of faults on these images (interpreted by authors) has been measured to check if they meet the expected dip for the type of fault according to Anderson's theory of faulting. Only 60% of fault dips are oriented in the expected dip range (30° - 60° for normal faults and less than 40° for reverse faults) for the type fault, while the remaining faults (40%) are distributed around (higher and lower) the expected dip ranges. Tectonic setting on the papers that contain these images with unexpected fault dips has been reviewed to see if the authors mentioned any effects applied on dips related to rotation or inversion of faults caused by tectonic forces. Faults of 11 images (of a total 117 images) are not rotated or affected by inversion force. An interpretation exercise has been done in this study shows that interpreters would interpret fault dip differently in VE images versus non-VE. A published conference paper by (Alcalde, 2018) shows that faults geometry have been interpreted differently in the same section by many interpreters because the presentation of this seismic section was different. Overall, the vertical exaggeration is really an issue in the published literature. The study found that the interpretation of faults on VE images results in erroneous dips that falls in either expected or unexpected dip-ranges (mostly in a steeper dip-ranges). Consequently, invoking tectonic processes from the vertically exaggerated images would be compromised.