First Break - Volume 28, Issue 8, 2010

Gabriella Castiello, Giovanni Florio, Marino Grimaldi and Maurizio Fedi describe a microgravity investigation of a subsurface cavity in the urban environment of Naples drawing attention to the care required in managing the acquisition and processing to achieve the optimal result.

With case studies from South Africa and Sweden, Torleif Dahlin, Håkan Rosqvist and Virginie Leroux show how resistivity and time-domain induced polarization investigations can be combined to make a powerful tool for delineating the extent of buried waste as well as mapping contaminant leakage.

In this illustration of geophysical techniques in modern archaeological investigation, Marian Hertrich, Mitch Jie-A-Looi, Miroslav Vrzba, Beat Horisberger, Patrick Nagy and Alan Green present the results of two surveys conducted across buried Roman villas in northern Switzerland.

P.P. Kruiver, R.P. Noorlandt, R.S. Westerhoff, M.H.P. Kleuskens and R.M. Hoogendoorn present a surface wave technique which could be useful in assessing consolidation of the tailings ponds of oil-sands, particularly in Canada where this is problematic. Three case studies illustrate the method’s application on soft, unconsolidated sediments on water and on land.

Niklas Linde, Ilaria Coscia, Joseph A. Doetsch, Stewart A. Greenhalgh, Tobias Vogt, Philipp Schneider and Alan G. Green provide examples from the Thur River in Switzerland to recommend that geophysical surveys and geophysical monitoring be included before and after larger scale river restoration projects to determine how such operations affect aquifer morphology and infiltration patterns.

Hansruedi Maurer, Thomas Spillmann, Björn Heincke, Christian Hauck, Simon Loew, Sarah M. Springman and Alan G. Green assess the potential and limitations of diverse surface and borehole geophysical techniques for investigating potentially unstable mountain slopes which can potentially put transport routes, power networks, communication lines, and human habitats at risk.

T. Spillmann, P. Blümling, E. Manukyan, S. Marelli, H. R. Maurer, S.A. Greenhalgh and A.G. Green discuss Swiss research programmes to develop safe solutions for the longterm disposal of high-level radioactive waste in which geophysics plays an important role with respect to site characterization and development of monitoring techniques. Several seismic projects are highlighted in the report.

In the E&P seismic industry, surface waves tend to be regarded only as coherent noise that needs to be filtered out as soon as possible. Claudio Strobbia, Peter Vermeer, Andreas Laake, Anna Glushchenko and Simone Re of WesternGeco discuss a workflow for land seismic in which surface waves can be treated as a signal that can be lifted from the seismic record and exploited in a variety of geophysical solutions.