Several areas of Earth with large accumulations of oil and gas also have huge deposits of salt below the surface.
But unfortunately, knowing where large salt deposits are precisely is very difficult. Professional seismic imaging still requires expert human interpretation of salt bodies. This leads to very subjective, highly variable renderings. More alarmingly, it leads to potentially dangerous situations for oil and gas company drillers.
To create the most accurate seismic images and 3D renderings, TGS (the world’s leading geoscience data company) is hoping Kaggle’s machine learning community will be able to build an algorithm that automatically and accurately identifies if a subsurface target is salt or not.