The effective microseismic signals are disturbed by noises, so the precision of time delay estimation is affected. Because time delay estimation is the key to determine location accuracy, one dimensional slice method based on third order cumulants was proposed for microseismic signal time delay estimation. Firstly, the three order self accumulation and mutual accumulation of the signals were calculated, then, one dimensional slice was obtained in order to reduce the computation and to satisfy the field real time requirements. Finally, the time delay value was obtained by the criterion function. Compared with the traditional cross correlation method, this method has less sensitivity to the Gauss noise with unknown correlation and has stronger inhibition ability to the correlated Gauss noise. The simulation results show that the detection probability and root mean square error are better than the traditional method under the influence of Gauss random noise and correlated noise with SNR=-5 dB to SNR=15 dB. In the implementation of real data, the real microseismic noise probability statistic characteristics were analyzed and the data in the well were selected as references, and then the time delay value to the ground data was calculated on the basis of the surface and borehole observation. The validity and the practicability of this method were verified.