First Published: First Break, December 2025, by Ed Hodges, Cerys James and John Brittan (TGS).
Introduction
For many years, towed-streamer seismic data has been delivered from the vessel to the processing centre or to a data storage facility on physical media, typically enterprise tape cartridges such as IBM 3592 JC. This method, long considered the industry standard, often introduced significant delays between acquisition and commencing processing. Some contractors then switched to utilising physical disks (NAS drives) instead of tapes. However, this does not reduce the shipment delays but can mitigate against corrupted or bad tapes. Historically, this led to many seismic contractors placing significant amounts of High-Performance Computing (HPC) onboard their vessels along with the required infrastructure, spares and corresponding support structure and of course the highly qualified, experienced processing geophysicists to perform the processing, typically working shift patterns on an offshore rotation of 5 or 6 weeks. Often, this led to a fast-track product being either partially or fully generated offshore, onboard the vessel, because this was seen as a timely way to create an
interpretable volume. Often weeks later, the field data would be delivered to an onshore processing centre where a processing team would probably take more than a year to achieve full-integrity final volumes for interpretation, which offered uplift over the similar products created offshore. Whilst the improvements may have been dramatic and certainly significant, there are numerous cases where the full integrity volumes came too late to influence
initial drilling decisions.
Location of the Satellite antenna following the minimum separation criteria
Alternative strategies included decimating and compressing subsets of field data for satellite transmission to onshore processing centres, enabling preliminary processing. While effective
to some extent, these methods involved compromises in data quality and completeness. Recent technological advancements have transformed this landscape.
The advent of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellations, such as those provided by Starlink, has revolutionised connectivity for marine seismic operations. These systems offer high bandwidth and low latency at significantly reduced costs, eliminating the need for both data decimation and lossy compression. This technology makes near-real-time data transfer and remote processing a practical reality. In this paper, we expand on the potential applications proposed by Ewig et al (2024) and provide case studies detailing the experience gained actively using this approach.
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