| Abstract: | Shear-waves have complicated interactions with the free surface, particularly in the presence of low-velocity surface layers, topographic irregularities, and the expected near-surface crack and stress anomalies. Consequently, it has been suggested that shear-waves should be recorded subsurface in vertical seismic profiles (VSPs), in order to extract accurate information about the in situ crack and stress geometry contained in shear-wave splitting. This paper compares the information in synthetic shear-waves in reflection gathers and VSPs, in order to assess the relative merits of the two techniques for investigating shear-wave splitting. Synthetic seismograms demonstrate that in the presence of even very simple surface layers, shear-waves recorded in reflection surveys at the surface have polarizations which may not indicate crack and stress geometry at depth. In contrast, shear-waves recorded in VSPs are relatively unaffected by surface layers and near-surface stress and crack anomalies, and the behaviour of shear-wave splitting is dominated by the structure of the rock mass in the vicinity of subsurface geophones. Matrix rotations of multicomponent-multisource shear-wave reflection data to extract the information contained in the split shear-waves, are found to be directly meaningful only in situations where crack orientations do not change with depth. |
