A system and method for attenuating surface waves in common shot gathers of seismic data recorded by a set of geophones by: iteratively executing a genetic algorithm over a plurality of generations to generate an optimal one-dimensional (1D) Earth model based on the common shot gather data by, successively refining a pool of candidate Earth models to better fit the common shot gather data, until optimal Earth models in sequential generations converge; generating synthetic surface wave data based on the optimal Earth model and canceling the synthetic surface wave data from the common shot gather data to generate new common shot gather data that reduces the noise due to surface waves; and iteratively executing the genetic algorithm over each new common shot gather data until optimal Earth models generated in sequential iterations of the genetic algorithm converge.