Resistivity and induced polarization. Theory and applications to the near-surface Earth / Удельное сопротивление и индуцированная поляризация. Теория и приложения к приповерхностным слоям Земли

The year 2020 marks the 100-year anniversary of Conrad Schlumberger’s publication on electrical methods, a document that serves as the foundation of modern-day resistivity and induced polarization methods. These methods are now two of the most widely used geophysical techniques for probing the near-surface (upper few hundred metres of the Earth’s crust). Although originally developed for hydrocarbon and mineral exploration, their popularity in near-surface applications grew rapidly from the widespread recognition that subsurface electrical properties are often well correlated to physical and chemical properties of fluids within the pore space (e.g. saturation, salinity) and lithological characteristics (e.g. porosity, clay content) needed to understand a wide range of near-surface properties and processes. This has opened up numerous areas of application, including hydrology, civil engineering, agronomy, forensic science and archaeology. Furthermore, the theoretical concepts are well established, and field measurement techniques are highly scalable, allowing investigations from cm to km scale. Measurements can be made in a wide variety of configurations, allowing simple mapping through to 3D time-lapse imaging. Compared to many other near-surface methods, instrumentation is relatively low cost and straightforward to operate. Added to this, many interpretation (modelling) tools are now widely available and continue to evolve. <...>