Extracting geological geospatial information from UK continental shelf scanned legacy seismic data

This report provides a detailed workflow to extract spatially referenced lithostratigraphic information from scanned seismic and borehole records curated by the British Geological Survey. The rationale for this report is to enable any technical staff proficient in, and with access to, ArcGIS Pro, and some form of drawing software e.g., CorelDraw, to make digital picks of geological information from the wealth of legacy data and therefore maximise outputs. The instructions contained within the report are written in such a way that they can be used by, for example, undergraduate university students enrolled in geoscience programs. Therefore, this report could be used to underpin undergraduate and postgraduate research projects looking to utilise open-source data, which would be mutually beneficial for the strategic goals of BGS to improve existing maps of the shallow geology on the UK continental shelf (UKCS). The workflow assumes that the user starts with no data but has access to the required software. Detailed instructions are provided to direct the user to the relevant data sources and how to download and import the data into their working areas. Users following the workflow, would progress from data access, through download and data preparation, geospatial referencing of scanned (originally paper-based-datasets), to ultimately producing digital X,Y,Z data points for interpreted geological horizons. The ouput X,Y,Z data points can used to generated gridded surfaces or be imported into a GIS program or subsurface data visualisation program, where they can be used to aid, or complement, interpretations picked on modern digital SEGY-format seismic data. The data available on the offshore geoindex are delivered under the terms of the Open Government Licence, subject to the following acknowledgement accompanying the reproduced BGS materials: “Contains British Geological Survey materials © UKRI [year]”. Contact us (digitaldata@bgs.ac.uk) if you create something new and innovative that could benefit others.