A Study on Electric Field Measurement as an Aid to Geophysical Resistivity High-Resolution Prospecting Methods

Recently electrical measurement technique for geophysical survey has become to contribute to the problems in groundwater delineation, evaluation and protection, landfills, earth and water contamination, chemical waste disposal, nuclear waste disposal, earthquake risk evaluation, radon emanations, landslides, land subsidence, crop-land salinization, and general geoengineering problems. In this paper, a fundamental problem on electric field measurement for high accuracy resistivity interpretation has been investigated by the three-dimensional resistance network algorithm. Usually, the conventional direct current resistivity methods include mainly two kinds of electrode array moving systems, i. e., so-called the first potential and the second potential methods. Also the potential methods can be conducted by not only the potential apparent resistivity measurement, but also the electric field measurement by which the response due to target inhomogeneity may be enhanced effectively including its visualization for resistivity high-resolution prospecting.