Seismic anisotropy in salt structures due to preferred crystal orientation

Abstract

Texture analysis of natural rock salt and experimentally deformed halite have shown that lattice preferred orientation of halite crystals does occur. The elastic parameters for a range of halite polycrystalline aggregates are calculated using orientation distribution functions. These are used to construct seismic models which are ray-traced through to investigate the potential effects of seismic anisotropy in salt structures. Anisotropic salt models show significant variation in travel time from the isotropic salt model and large shear-wave splitting is predicted. Copyright C 1998, Institut Français du Pétrole.