A methodology for 3D geological mapping and implementation

Abstract

Using 3D visualization models to exhibit geological structure has become a trend in geological studies. Compared to 2D geological mapping, 3D geological mapping is dependent on more geological sampling information. Geophysical methods (e.g., gravity, seismic, and electric) thus become the major tools in 3D geological mapping. In traditional works, people must extract the geological information from various data grids acquired through different geophysical methods and subsequently integrate the information to manually construct a 3D geological model. This approach usually causes inconvenience and inefficiencies in practice. Therefore, we propose a methodology of 3D geological mapping. It first constructs visualization models from different geophysical data grids and subsequently integrates these models for interpretation and finally converts to a 3D geological model. Based on this methodology, we implement the corresponding system which can accomplish the above process automatically. As an example, we gave a detail description for constructing the 3D lithological model by the methodology mentioned above with the geological survey data acquired in the western Jungger, Xinjiang of China. The demonstration show us that the methodology can effectively solve the matter of 3D geological modeling in case of enriched in geophysical data but in lack of sufficient geological sampling information.