Joint elastic-electrical properties of sediments in the Yellow Sea

Abstract

We measured in the laboratory compressional wave velocity and electrical resistivity on 434 sediment samples collected from the Yellow Sea to study the joint elastic-electrical properties of marine sediments. Porosity was found to reduce both elastic velocity and electrical resistivity of the marine sediments in a non-linear fashion; velocity showed an approximate linear increase with increasing logarithm of resistivity. Various effective medium models either implemented or developed were compared with the new dataset. The model results showed that the combined self-consistent approximation and differential effective medium model using critical porosity of 0.6 and 0.5 for velocity and resistivity respectively gave a reasonable description of the joint elastic-electrical behaviors of the marine sediments. The joint elastic-electrical properties of the marine sediments established would be used to estimate resistivity from measured velocity and vice versa, and could also be suitable for detection of gas hydrate or other suitable targets from joint seismic-resistivity surveys.