Deep seismic reflection profiling technology in land areas: A review and prospects

Deep seismic reflection profiling has been internationally proven to be a leading technology for deep earth exploration. With longer arrangement and greater energy than those used in oil seismic exploration, this technology can detect the fine-scaled structures and tectonic features from the earth surface to the upper mantle. Therefore, it is widely applied to the detection of continental and marine crust and upper mantle, with fruitful achievements having been made in revealing deep earth dynamic processes, expounding on the geotectonic evolution, determining the basin-mountain coupling, inferring the metallogenic and reservoir formation conditions, and analyzing earthquake disasters. This paper systematically reviews and sorts the research status of deep seismic reflection profiling in land areas in China and abroad, as well as typical application cases of this technology. It summarizes the research results and the most recent progress of deep seismic reflection profiling from the perspective of field data acquisition, data processing, the geological interpretation of profiles, and multi-method joint exploration. Furthermore, this study the explores the possible development directions of deep seismic reflection profiling in the future from four aspects: (1) Regarding the field data acquisition, different excitation and reception combination will be developed to improve the quality of deep seismic reflection data, reduce environmental damage and economic cost; (2) Improving the signal-to-noise ratio and resolution of deep seismic reflection profiles, and quantitatively monitoring the relative variations in the seismic amplitude fidelity during the processing of deep seismic reflection data; (3) Digging out potential information of pre-stack and post-stack in the deep seismic reflection profiles from seismic data during data interpretation, aiming to reduce the non-uniqueness in the interpretations of only deep seismic reflection amplitude; (4) Multi-disciplinary, -angle, -scale and -method mutual supplementation and validation in the comprehensive research for the purpose of reducing the multiplicity of solutions of the reflection profiles and improving the accuracy and reliability of the results.