Oil Exploration

MESA was first applied as an oil-exploration tool, drawing on the 1976 work of John Burg, a researcher who first developed and published the method. A common way of searching for oil is to set off explosions that send out sound bursts at known frequencies, and then “listen” to the echoes at different locations. Since oil-bearing and non-oil-bearing subterranean geologic formations reflect the sound differently, “maps” of an area’s subsurface geology can be created and likely oil deposits pinpointed.

The key information for mapping lies in the exact way that the principal frequencies of the explosions are modified by their underground travel. However, by the time the sound bursts from the explosions reach the listening sensors, their sound has been dampened and distorted by reflections and by passage through irregular bodies of sand, clay, water, different types of rock, and so on. The result is a burst of apparently chaotic noise. The challenge facing the prospecting geophysicists, then, is to pick out the now-faint principal frequencies from the jumbled noise recorded by their sensors, all within very short data samples due to the brevity of the explosions themselves.

MESA was the technique developed to accomplish this task. The geophysicists know the original frequencies emitted by the explosions, and they usually have a rough idea of what the subsurface geology is and how it is likely to modify the original frequencies. So they can predict a range of frequencies where they expect to hear the principal sounds of the explosions. They then tell MESA to check different frequencies within that range, or beyond if necessary. Thanks to MESA’s sensitivity and ability to home in on cyclic data even in the presence of a large amount of chaotic “noise,” they can then pick out just the principal sounds of the explosion, and analyze the modifications due to the geology, while discarding the jumbled echoes, reflections, and other sonic junk.

Topics:

MESA and Radar Jamming

MESA and Fourier Analysis

MESA and Market Analysis

Using MESA, by John Ehlers

Applying MESA Studies