A modified Swanson method to determine permeability from mercury intrusion data in marine muds

Abstract

Abstract The permeability of shallow marine sediments is an extremely important parameter to constrain, as it affects fluid and nutrient transport near the sediment-water interface, mediates mass exchange between igneous basement and oceans, and plays a role in seismicity along convergent margins. Determining the permeability of these sediments in the laboratory is difficult because existing methods typically require fully saturated, intact samples of large volume (tens of cm3), which are usually not collected with high spatial resolution in scientific ocean drilling operations. We demonstrate how mercury injection capillary pressure (MICP) data may be used to predict the permeability of marine muds using a modification of the widely used Swanson method. Our results show that MICP measurements performed on small, irregular, and, most importantly, unpreserved samples can yield important permeability information. This will improve the spatial resolution of permeability data in the shallow marine subsurface and allow analyses to be performed on the significant quantities of existing legacy core.