Abstract
Abstract. Marine self-potential (SP) investigation is an effective method to study deep-sea hydrothermal vents and seafloor sulfide deposits. At present, one of the commonly used marine self-potential systems is a towed array of electrodes. Large noises are recorded when great changes in electrode distance and array attitude occur due to the complex seafloor topography. In this paper, a new multicomponent electrical field observation system based on an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) was introduced for the measurement of seafloor self-potential signals. The system was tested in a lake, and the multicomponent self-potential data were collected from there. Observed data involve the navigational information of the AUV, which could be corrected using a rotation transform. After navigational correction, measured data can recover the location of the artificial source using self-potential tomography. The experimental results showed that the new SP system can be applied to marine SP observations, providing an efficient and low-noise SP acquisition method for marine resources and environmental investigations.
Highlights
The self-potential (SP) method has a long history on land and plays an important role in the delineation and resource evaluation of metal sulfide ore bodies (Fox, 1830)
A seafloor SP measurement system that consisted of three pairs of perpendicular electrodes attached to the autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) (Qianlong 2) was introduced
The observed results were consistent with the numerical simulation, which verifies the feasibility of the AUV-SP system for multicomponent SP exploration
Summary
The self-potential (SP) method has a long history on land and plays an important role in the delineation and resource evaluation of metal sulfide ore bodies (Fox, 1830). Cherkashev et al (2013) used a deep-sea towed SP instrument to locate seafloor sulfide deposits associated with hydrothermal vents near the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The towed array is susceptible to being distorted by ocean currents, and the distance between the soft connected electrodes changes greatly Both of these factors will affect the precision of the measured SP amplitude, especially in midocean ridges, where the seafloor topography varies greatly (Constable et al, 2018). To improve the stability and efficiency of marine SP configuration used in the deep-sea environment, combined with the ideas of Constable et al (2018), the autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) was modified with four channel electrical field sensors in its tail to detect the marine SP responses (hereafter referred to as an AUV-SP), which was expected to be helpful for seafloor sulfide exploration. Measured multicomponent data were inverted using self-potential tomography (Jardani et al, 2008; Revil et al, 2008; Rittgers et al, 2013) to verify the capability of multicomponent self-potential detection
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