ABSTRACTDetermining the shape of a pulse generated by an explosion solely from the data provided by the recorded seismic trace is a difficult and even ambitious task.Knowledge of parameters such as length and number of “arches” of the pulse under study is, in fact, indispensable in solving this problem.These parameters cannot be found directly in the seismic trace, which nevertheless contains a great amount of information. Autocorrelation, with its mathematical and statistical properties, is an efficient way of making the best of this information.We compute all the autocorrelations of reflections having a given number of arches which fulfil certain conditions determined in advance. Then, after statistical testing of some parameters pertaining to the autocorrelations (abcissae of zeros, of extrema …), we select only those with a maximum likelihood. It is sufficient to consider only the reflections whose autocorrelations have been selected and to arrange them in groups according to their shape and arch number in order to obtain average pulses.In so doing several solutions are arrived at, but when considering a given number of traces, a single record for instance, it is possible by comparing these results with each other to considerably reduce their number.In the last part of the paper the nature of the impulse obtained with our method is examined in order to find out whether it is “minimum phase” for carrying out decon