Electroseismic investigation of the shallow subsurface: Field measurements and numerical modeling

Abstract

Recent studies have demonstrated that electroseismic phenomena in porous media have the potential to detect zones of high fluid mobility and fluid chemistry contrasts in the subsurface. However, there have only been a few field studies of these phenomena since they were first observed 60 years ago. None of these studies were able to support observations with an explicit comparison to results of full waveform modeling. In this paper, we demonstrate that the electroseismic phenomena in porous media can be observed in the field, explained, and modeled numerically, yielding a good agreement between the field and the synthetic data. We first outline the design of our field experiment and describe the procedure used to reduce noise in the electroseismic data. After that, we present and interpret the field data, demonstrating how and where different electroseismic signals originated in the subsurface. Finally, we model our field experiment numerically and demonstrate that the numerical results correctly simulate arrival times, polarity, and amplitude variation with offset behavior of the electroseismic signals measured in the field.