• Journal of the Korean earth science society
• /
• v.30 no.6
• /
• pp.699-708
• /
• 2009

Recently as the interest in the development of domestic ore deposits has increased, we can easily find some studies on exploration geophysics-based ore-deposit survey in literature. Based on the fact that mineralized zone are generally more conductive than surrounding media, electrical resistivity survey among several geophysical surveys has been applied to investigate metallic ore deposits. Most of them are grounded on 2-D survey. However, 2-D inversion may lead to some misinterpretation for 3-D geological structures. In this study, we investigate the feasibility of the 3-D electrical resistivity survey to 3-D vein-type ore deposits. We first simulate 2-D dipole-dipole survey data for survey lines normal to the strike and 3-D pole-pole survey data, and then perform 3-D inversion. For 3-D ore-body structures, we assume a width-varying dyke, a wedge-shaped, and a fault model. The 3-D inversion results are compared to 2-D inversion results. By comparing 3-D inversion results for 2-D dipole-dipole survey data to 3-D inversion results for 3-D pole-pole survey data, we could note that the 2-D dipole-dipole survey data yield better inversion results than the 3-D pole-pole data, which is due to the main characteristic of the pole-pole array. From these results, we are convinced that if we have certain information on the direction of the strike, it would be desirable to apply 2-D dipole-diple survey for the survey lines normal to the strike. However, in most cases, we do not have any information on the direction of the strike, because we already developed the ore deposit with the outcrops and the remaining ore deposits are buried under the surface. In that case, performing 3-D pole-pole electrical resistivity survey would be a reasonable choice to obtain more accurate interpretation on ore body structure in spite of low resolution of pole-pole array.