The demand for deep prospecting has led to an increase in the enthusiasm for seismic techniques in mineral exploration. Reflection seismology applications in the base metal industry have achieved success. For orogenic gold deposits, however, their applicable conditions remain to be investigated. This paper simulated seismic wave propagation based on a finite-difference algorithm with an accuracy of eighth order in space and second order in time to investigate the factors influencing the reflection seismic exploration results. Then, the paper assessed the algorithm’s feasibility for orogenic gold deposits, taking the giant Zaozigou deposit in central China as an example. The forward modeling showed that the petrophysical properties, dimensions, and dip of targets significantly affected the seismic exploration results. In the Zaozigou model, shallowly dipping orebodies were well imaged with precise extension and thickness. Steeply dipping orebodies were recognized but their thickness information was lost. Steeply dipping orebodies at depth were not detectable under a surface configuration. These problems could be effectively solved by increasing the array length and using vertical seismic profiling methods. For small orebodies, multiwave and multicomponent seismic techniques offered more valuable information in terms of mineral exploration. In conclusion, it was possible to locate orogenic gold deposits using the reflection seismology method.

Passive-source exploration is a method of seismic exploration that has loose requirements on the conditions of the surface, is cheap, and does not require excitation by an active source. The ambient seismic signals collected from the field over an extended period of time can be used to generate virtual-shot seismic records similar to those obtained from the seismic exploration of an active source based on the relevant correlations, and this can in turn yield information on the underground structure through a series of conventional methods of processing seismic data. Three-dimensional (3D) processing can mitigate the influence of the azimuth of random noise to yield a more representative underground structure, but requires intensive computation. In this paper, we propose a 3D method to compute reflections of a passive source based on the geometry of seismic exploration. Assuming a high quality of imaging, we use information on the predesigned geometry to choose and correlate noisy synthetic data on the reflections by a seismic body to create virtual shot data, and subsequently capture images of the 3D data on passive reflection. The use of the predesigned geometry ensures that only the important and useful parts of the dataset are used for correlation and imaging, where this reduces the cost of computation. The proposed method can thus efficiently generate high-quality 3D synthetic data.