Advances in marine deep seismic exploration technology: A review

Marine deep seismic exploration is a core technique for imaging deep submarine structures and supporting marine resource exploration. This paper reviews recent advances in the acquisition, processing, and integrated interpretation of marine deep seismic exploration. Major acquisition technologies include large-source long-streamer, wide-line, ocean bottom seismometer (OBS), dual-ship acquisition, and marine distributed acoustic sensing. These methods differ in penetration depth, resolution, operational efficiency, and cost: streamer systems provide high-resolution shallow-to-mid-crust imaging, while OBS enables robust wide-angle refraction recording for deep-velocity modeling. Processing advances focus on noise and multiple suppression, ghost elimination, broadband reconstruction, high-precision velocity modeling, and Moho imaging. Inversion methods include traveltime tomography, full-waveform inversion, and multi-parameter joint inversion, which provide quantitative constraints on crustal velocity and lithology. Integrated interpretation combines seismic with gravity, magnetic, magnetotelluric, and geological data to reduce non-uniqueness. This review clarifies technical strengths, limitations, and suitable scenarios of each method. Future development will move toward broadband, intelligent, autonomous, and multi-physics integrated systems for deeper, higher-precision imaging of oceanic lithospheric structures.