Pinpoint Allows Seismic to go Lineless

If you live in western Canada chances are you’ve seen a seismic line. Narrow corridors cut through the bush, seismic lines facilitate access for people and equipment to conduct geophysical surveys to interpret subsurface attributes important for oil and gas production. Once cut with bulldozers as 6-8 m wide, flat work surfaces, conventional (i.e. legacy) lines impact myriad birds and mammals. Creation of those flat work surfaces removed aboveground vegetation, roots, and soil. In doing so, conventional lines altered basic ecosystem processes that stalled expected recovery trajectories and established different vegetation communities preventing recovery to pre-disturbance states and perpetuating impacts to animals, especially in wet landcover types like bogs, fens, marshes, and swamps. Since the mid-1990s, efforts to mitigate impacts have focused on preparing narrower low-impact seismic (LIS) lines that remove only aboveground vegetation. Now routinely cut to between ~ 1.75 and 2.75 m wide using mulchers, LIS is considered standard practice across most jurisdictions in Canada. However, LIS mitigations are not 100% effective. Only the narrowest LIS lines seem to prevent impacts to animals and there is considerable individual variation in species’ response. Vegetation appears to recover more quickly along LIS lines, but that trajectory is complex and depends on line orientation and width.