Geophysics - Depth Determinations by Electrical Resistivity

RESISTIVITY measurements for determining depth to bedrock, water table, and other geologic discontinuities have had only limited success. Many of the difficulties can be attributed to complex geology and to basic limitations of the method; current flow through a continuous medium is a diffusion phenomenon, emphasizing irregularities near the source and smoothing out those at a distance. Some of the failures, however, are due to careless field work and incompetent interpretation. A forthcoming publication1 may help to reduce difficulties of this sort. The writer here attempts to bring order into the multiplicity of interpretation methods and, to a limited extent, to evaluate them. For all methods, the field data to be interpreted consist of apparent resistivity values plotted against electrode separation, Fig. 1. The interpretation should give depths to one or more geologic horizons. Direct currents and the Wenner four-electrode configuration will be assumed, since these are widely used, although the interpretation problems remain essentially the same for other electrode configurations. Alternating currents higher than, say, 20 cycles per second introduce complications beyond the scope of this paper. Three approaches to the interpretation problem have been used. These may be called empirical, theoretical curve matching, and direct. Many techniques have been proposed, but each can be reduced to one of these approaches and to a single geologic idealization. This idealization rests on the following assumption: the earth in the limited volume of interest can be approximated by a horizontal sequence of layers, each homogeneous and isotropic in its electrical properties. This seemingly restrictive assumption has proved to have practical value, although future work should aim at removing some