Seismic Imaging and Inversion Techniques

Seismic imaging and inversion use recorded ground vibrations to reconstruct the physical properties of Earth's interior, treating the subsurface as an unknown whose structure must be inferred from how waves travel, reflect, and scatter through it. Full-waveform inversion pushes this further by matching not just the timing but the complete shape of seismic signals to extract fine-scale details about rock elasticity, density, and anisotropy — properties that govern everything from oil and gas exploration to earthquake hazard assessment. A central challenge is that the underlying mathematical problem is ill-posed: many different subsurface models can reproduce the same surface measurements, so researchers rely on regularization strategies, adjoint-based gradient methods, and rock physics constraints to guide solutions toward geologically plausible answers. Active frontiers include handling frequency-dependent anisotropy more rigorously, scaling full-waveform methods to crustal and mantle depths, and reducing the enormous computational cost of iterative wave-equation-based inversion on realistic 3-D datasets.

Works

204,764

Total citations

1,321,720

Keywords

Seismic Waveform InversionFull-Waveform TomographyGeophysical ImagingElastic PropertiesFrequency-Dependent AnisotropySeismic Data Processing