• Economic and Environmental Geology
• /
• v.37 no.2
• /
• pp.185-193
• /
• 2004

A physical model experiment was conducted using a sand and gravel-filled tank model, to investigate the influence on the GPR response of LNAPL vapor phase effects in the unsaturated zone and of residual phase of LNAPL trapped in the saturated zone. Background measurements of GPR were made with only water in the tank using a fluctuating water table model. Gasoline was, then, injected into the bottom of the model tank to simulate a subsurface discharge from a leaking pipe or tank at depth, obtaining GPR data with rising and lowering of water table. Results from the experiment show the GPR sensitivity to the changes in the moisture content in the vadose zone and its effectiveness for monitoring minor fluctuation of the water table. The results also demonstrate a potential of GPR for monitoring possible vapor phase effects of volatile hydrocarbons in the vadose zone as a function of time, and for detecting the effects of residual phase of hydrocarbons in the water saturated system. In addition, the results provide the basis for a strategy that has the potential to successfully detect and delineate residual LNAPL contamination in the water-saturated system at field sites where the conditions are similar to those simulated in the physcial models described herein.

• Geophysics and Geophysical Exploration
• /
• v.11 no.1
• /
• pp.34-40
• /
• 2008

Underwater seismic refraction with advanced interpretation approaches makes important contributions to shallow marine exploration and geotechnical investigations in Australia's coastal areas. A series of case studies are presented to demonstrate the recent applications of continuous and static USR methods to river crossing and port infrastructure projects at various sites around Australia. In Sydney, static underwater seismic refraction (USR) with bottom-placed receivers and borehole seismic imaging assisted the development of improved geotechnical models that reduced construction risk for a tunnel crossing of the Lane Cove River. In Melbourne, combining conventional boomer reflection and continuous USR with near-bottom sources and receivers improved the definition of a buried, variably weathered basalt flow and assisted dredging assessment for navigation channel upgrades at Geelong Ports. Sand quality assessment with continuous USR and widely spaced borehole information assisted commercial decisions on available sand resources for the reclamation phase of development at the Port of Brisbane. Buried reefs and indurated layers occur in Australian coastal sediments with the characteristics of laterally limited, high velocity, cap layers within lower velocity materials. If these features are not recognised then significant error in depth determination to deeper refractors can occur. Application of advanced refraction inversion using wavefront eikonal tomography to continuous USR data obtained along the route of a proposed offshore pipeline near Fremantle allowed these layers and the underlying bedrock refractor to be accurately imaged. Static USR and the same interpretation approach was used to image the drowned granitic regolith beneath sediments and indurated layers in the northern area of Western Australia at a proposed new berthing site where deep piling was required. This allowed preferred piling sites to be identified, reducing overall pile lengths. USR can be expected to find increased application to shallow marine exploration and geotechnical investigations in Australia's coastal areas as economic growth continues and improved interpretation methods are developed.

• Journal of Korean Tunnelling and Underground Space Association
• /
• v.14 no.5
• /
• pp.503-516
• /
• 2012

Rock mass rating (RMR) is the key factor when designing the appropriate support pattern of tunnel projects. Borehole drilling is usually performed along the tunnel route in order to determine the rock mass rating to be used for tunnel design. The rock mass rating at the non-boring region between boreholes is usually assessed through geophysical surveys such as electrical prospecting, seismic prospecting, etc. Many studies were carried out to find out the correlation between electrical resistivity and rock mass rating. However, most researches were aimed at obtaining the relationship between the two parameters utilizing experimental results obtained from laboratory tests or electrical prospectings. In this paper, efforts were made to analyze and obtain relationships between the electrical resistivity obtained from in-situ electrical resistivity logging data and the rock mass rating. Correlation studies using field data showed that the electrical resistivity is highly correlated with the rock mass rating with the determination coefficient more than 90%. The correlation analysis was also carried out between RMR classification parameters and the electrical resistivity. It was shown that the correlation between the condition of discontinuities and the electrical resistivity was very high with the determination coefficient more than 80%; that between the groundwater condition and the electrical resistivity was very low with the determination coefficient less than 57%.

• Journal of the Korean Geotechnical Society
• /
• v.37 no.1
• /
• pp.29-41
• /
• 2021

Although underground works are essential to use underground spaces in urban areas efficiently, various damages caused by constructions have often occurred, making them major social problems. Since 2018, it is stipulated in the Special Act on Underground Safety Management that appropriate construction methods must be used in the design stage to prevent various damage cases. This Special Act includes establishing an area subject to underground safety impact assessment, analysis of ground and geological status, review of effects caused by changes in groundwater, review of ground safety, and establishment of measures to secure underground safety. This study area consists of various strata in order of landfill, sedimentary silt, sedimentary sand, sedimentary gravel, weathering zone, and foundation rock. Also, the slurry wall, a highly rigid underground continuous wall, was chosen as a construction method to consider high water table distribution and minimize the influence of the surroundings in this area. However, ground subsidence occurred on the road nearby in December 2019 due to the inflow of loosening soil to the construction area. Thus, several types of site investigations were conducted to suggest an appropriate analysis method and to find out loosed ground behavior and its area for the subsided site. As a result, new design soil properties were re-calculated, and the reinforcement measures were proposed through analytical verification.

• Geophysics and Geophysical Exploration
• /
• v.1 no.1
• /
• pp.25-30
• /
• 1998

Time-lapse crosswell seismic data, recorded before and after the cavity filling, showed that the filling increased the velocity at a known cavity zone in an old mine site in Inchon area. The seismic response depicted on the tomogram and in conjunction with the geologic data from drillings imply that the size of the cavity may be either small or filled by debris. In this study, I attempted to evaluate the filling effect by analyzing velocity measured from the time-lapse tomograms. The data acquired by a downhole airgun and 24-channel hydrophone system revealed that there exists measurable amounts of source statics. I presented a methodology to estimate the source statics. The procedure for this method is: 1) examine the source firing-time for each source, and remove the effect of irregular firing time, and 2) estimate the residual statics caused by inaccurate source positioning. This proposed multi-step inversion may reduce high frequency numerical noise and enhance the resolution at the zone of interest. The multi-step inversion with different starting models successfully shows the subtle velocity changes at the small cavity zone. The inversion procedure is: 1) conduct an inversion using regular sized cells, and generate an image of gross velocity structure by applying a 2-D median filter on the resulting tomogram, and 2) construct the starting velocity model by modifying the final velocity model from the first phase. The model was modified so that the zone of interest consists of small-sized grids. The final velocity model developed from the baseline survey was as a starting velocity model on the monitor inversion. Since we expected a velocity change only in the cavity zone, in the monitor inversion, we can significantly reduce the number of model parameters by fixing the model out-side the cavity zone equal to the baseline model.

• 한국지구물리탐사학회:학술대회논문집
• /
• 2008.10a
• /
• pp.51-56
• /
• 2008

The waveform inversion for isotropic media has ever been studied since the 1980s, but there has been few studies for anisotropic media. We present a seismic waveform inversion algorithm for 2-D heterogeneous transversely isotropic structures. A cell-based finite difference algorithm for anisotropic media in time domain is adopted. The steepest descent during the non-linear iterative inversion approach is obtained by backpropagating residual errors using a reverse time migration technique. For scaling the gradient of a misfit function, we use the pseudo Hessian matrix which is assumed to neglect the zero-lag auto-correlation terms of impulse responses in the approximate Hessian matrix of the Gauss-Newton method. We demonstrate the use of these waveform inversion algorithm by applying them to a two layer model and the anisotropic Marmousi model data. With numerical examples, we show that it's difficult to converge to the true model when we assumed that anisotropic media are isotropic. Therefore, it is expected that our waveform inversion algorithm for anisotropic media is adequate to interpret real seismic exploration data.

• Journal of Soil and Groundwater Environment
• /
• v.7 no.3
• /
• pp.3-17
• /
• 2002

Data analysis of groundwater monitoring wells and geostatistical methods are used to identify the local characteristics of sea water intrusion and the range of sea water intrusion at the southeastern coastal area of Busan, Korea. Rainfall and groundwater level of two monitoring wells show a linear correlation because of the direct groundwater recharge by the precipitation. However, rainfall and electric conductivity have the inverse relationship because of the increase of groundwater. Electric conductivity rapidly increased at 24m depth and exceeded 20,000$\mu\textrm{s}$/cm near 26m depth in the monitoring wells. The variations of groundwater level and electric conductivity show that the interface between sea water and fresh water tends to move upward when groundwater level goes down. In the cross correlation analysis, groundwater level versus rainfall represents the largest cross correlation coefficient in 0 time lag but the cross correlation coefficient of electric conductivity versus rainfall is the largest when the time lag is 9 days. This suggests that the fluctuations of groundwater level respond to rainfall in a short time, but the interface between sea water and fresh water respond very slow to rainfall. Horizontal extents of sea water intrusion are estimated to 14 m from the east of Line 1, and 25 m from the southeast end of Line 2 in the inversion of dipole-dipole profiling data of two survey lines. The data of VES by the Schulumberger array in May and July show lognormal distributions. In the kriged apparent resistivity and earth resistivity distributions, the resistivities of July are increased comparing to those of May. This reflects that the concentration of sea water in aquifer is reduced due to the increased groundwater recharge from the rainfall in June and July. In analyzing the vertical and horizontal apparent resistivities and earth resistivity distributions, the geostatistical methods are very useful to identify the variations of earth resistivity distributions at the coastal area.

• Economic and Environmental Geology
• /
• v.55 no.5
• /
• pp.551-561
• /
• 2022

Geophysical exploration methods are very useful for generating high-resolution images of underground structures, and such methods can be applied to investigation of buried cultural properties and for determining their exact locations. In this study, image feature extraction and image segmentation methods were applied to automatically distinguish the structures of buried relics from the high-resolution ground-penetrating radar (GPR) images obtained at the center of Silla Kingdom, Gyeongju, South Korea. The major purpose for image feature extraction analyses is identifying the circular features from building remains and the linear features from ancient roads and fences. Feature extraction is implemented by applying the Canny edge detection and Hough transform algorithms. We applied the Hough transforms to the edge image resulted from the Canny algorithm in order to determine the locations the target features. However, the Hough transform requires different parameter settings for each survey sector. As for image segmentation, we applied the connected element labeling algorithm and object-based image analysis using Orfeo Toolbox (OTB) in QGIS. The connected components labeled image shows the signals associated with the target buried relics are effectively connected and labeled. However, we often find multiple labels are assigned to a single structure on the given GPR data. Object-based image analysis was conducted by using a Large-Scale Mean-Shift (LSMS) image segmentation. In this analysis, a vector layer containing pixel values for each segmented polygon was estimated first and then used to build a train-validation dataset by assigning the polygons to one class associated with the buried relics and another class for the background field. With the Random Forest Classifier, we find that the polygons on the LSMS image segmentation layer can be successfully classified into the polygons of the buried relics and those of the background. Thus, we propose that these automatic classification methods applied to the GPR images of buried cultural heritage in this study can be useful to obtain consistent analyses results for planning excavation processes.

• Geophysics and Geophysical Exploration
• /
• v.10 no.1
• /
• pp.1-18
• /
• 2007

Non-linear elastic wavefield inversion is a powerful method for estimating elastic parameters for physical constraints that determine subsurface rock and properties. Here, I introduce six elastic-wave velocity models by reconstructing elastic-wave velocity variations from real data and a 2D elastic-wave velocity model. Reflection seismic data information is often decoupled into short and long wavelength components. The local search method has difficulty in estimating the longer wavelength velocity if the starting model is far from the true model, and source frequencies are then changed from lower to higher bands (as in the 'frequency-cascade scheme') to estimate model elastic parameters. Elastic parameters are inverted at each inversion step ('simultaneous mode') with a starting model of linear P- and S-wave velocity trends with depth. Elastic parameters are also derived by inversion in three other modes - using a P- and S-wave velocity basis $('V_P\;V_S\;mode')$; P-impedance and Poisson's ratio basis $('I_P\;Poisson\;mode')$; and P- and S-impedance $('I_P\;I_S\;mode')$. Density values are updated at each elastic inversion step under three assumptions in each mode. By evaluating the accuracy of the inversion for each parameter set for elastic models, it can be concluded that there is no specific difference between the inversion results for the $V_P\;V_S$ mode and the $I_P$ Poisson mode. The same conclusion is expected for the $I_P\;I_S$ mode, too. This gives us a sound basis for full wavelength elastic wavefield inversion.

• Geophysics and Geophysical Exploration
• /
• v.8 no.2
• /
• pp.156-162
• /
• 2005

Particularly in research related to seawater intrusion the change of fluid electrical conductivity is one of major concerns, and effective monitoring can help to optimize a water pumping performance in coastal areas. Special considerations should be given to the mounting of sensors at proper depth during the monitoring design since the vertical distribution of fluid electrical conductivity is sensitive to the characteristics of seawater intrusion zone. This tells us the multi-channel electrical conductivity monitoring is of paramount consequence. It, however, is a rare event when this approach becomes routinely available in that commonly used commercial stand-alone type sensors are very expensive and inadequate for a long term monitoring of electrical conductivity or water level due to their restricted storage and difficulty of real-time control. For this reason, we have developed a real-time monitoring system that could meet these requirements. This system is user friendly, cost-effective, and easy to control measurement parameters - sampling interval, acquisition range, and others. And this devised system has been utilized for the electrical conductivity monitoring in boreholes, Yeonggwang-gun, Korea. Monitoring has been consecutively executed for 24 hours, and the responses of electrical conductivity at some channels have been regularly increased or decreased while pumping up water. It, with well logging data implemented before/after pumping water, verifies that electrical conductivity changes in the specified depths originate from fluid movements through sand layer or permeable fractured rock. Eventually, the multi-channel electrical conductivity monitoring system makes an effective key to secure groundwater resources in coastal areas.