I really enjoy OGJ and I think it is a fine journal. Great work.
I enjoyed reading your recent article on the state of the seismic industry (OGJ, Dec. 13, 1999, p. 32). It was pretty good. However, I felt you did fail to point out several major directions of the next decade or so.
The state of prestack depth migration is still based upon an acoustic model. As far as I know there is no industry elastic migration out there. As long as this is the case, we cannot truly tackle the realistic case of mode conversions-a serious issue where structure has endured severe deformation.
Furthermore, the recent advances of commodity supercomputing have now reached the oil industry (Morton, S. et al., 1999 SEG Expanded Abstracts). The future of contractor processing will be severly curtailed. In fact I run the 2D package Seismic Unix (CWP, Colorado Schools of Mines) on my laptop.
Thanks for such a nice article.
Theodore Stieglitz
Rice University
Dept. of geology and geophysics
Houston
