The results of marine electromagnetic sounding with a high-power remote source in the Kola Bay in the Barents Sea

The first Russian six-component seafloor electromagnetic (EM) receivers were tested in an experiment carried out in Kola Bay in the Barents Sea. The signals transmitted by a remote high-power ELF source at several frequencies in the decahertz range were recorded by six receivers deployed on the seafloor along the profile crossing the Kola Bay. Although not all the stations successfully recorded all the six components due to technical failures, the quality of the data overall is quite suitable for interpretation. The interpretation was carried out by the three-dimensional (3D) modeling of an electromagnetic field with neural network inversion. The a priori geoelectrical model of Kola Bay, which was reconstructed by generalizing the previous geological and geophysical data, including the data of the ground magnetotelluric sounding and magnetovariational profiling, provided the EM fields that are far from those measured in the experiment. However, by a step-by-step modification of the initial model, we achieved quite a satisfactory fit. The resulting model provides the basis for introducing the corrections into the previous notions concerning the regional geological and geophysical structure of the region and particularly the features associated with fault tectonics.