Monitoring water flow in karst using passive seismic 'listening’

DOI

Detecting and quantifying water flow structures in heterogeneous karst through geophysical imagery of karst structures, is open to large uncertainties. Here we determine that subterranean flow-induced seismic signal originating in karst subsurface water pathways such as fractures, conduits and caves can be detected as persistent frequencies on spectrograms. Conducting passive seismic surveys on two karst sites with shallow and deep conduits show that these frequencies are site dependent, and differ from what might be expected from surface water flow in rivers. We applied an amplitude-based location method to locate this flow-induced micro-tremor. Numerical simulation of the elasto-acoustic wave propagation in a simplified karst model shows that resonance plays an important role, excited by specific frequencies in the flow-related seismic spectrum. This study introduces a novel approach for detecting the flowing structures in karst by directly imaging the source itself rather than inferring flow pathways through geophysical imaging of karst structures. Waveform data is available from the GEOFON data centre, under network code 3V.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.14470/8I254008
Related Identifier HasMetadata https://geofon.gfz-potsdam.de/waveform/archive/response/3V/2019_2021
Related Identifier IsCompiledBy https://github.com/earthscope/msmod
Related Identifier IsCompiledBy https://ds.iris.edu/ds/nodes/dmc/software/downloads/pdcc/
Related Identifier IsCompiledBy https://docs.obspy.org/
Related Identifier References https://www.ipgp.fr/~crawford/Documents/OBS_data_standards.pdf
Metadata Access http://doidb.wdc-terra.org/oaip/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=oai:doidb.wdc-terra.org:8008
Provenance
Creator Bean, Chris ORCID logo
Publisher GFZ Data Services
Contributor Deutsches GeoForschungsZentrum GFZ; GEOFON Data Centre; geofon(at)gfz-potsdam.de; Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS)
Publication Year 2024
Funding Reference Science Foundation Ireland https://doi.org/10.13039/501100001602 Crossref Funder ID 16/SP/4319 https://www.sfi.ie/funding/ ; Geological Survey Ireland WWW https://www.gsi.ie/ ; Transport Infrastructure Ireland WWW https://www.tii.ie/
Rights embargoed access; Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International; https://vocabularies.coar-repositories.org/access_rights/c_f1cf/; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode
OpenAccess true
Contact geofon(at)gfz-potsdam.de
Representation
Language English
Resource Type Seismic Network; Dataset
Format .mseed; XML
Size 88GB
Discipline Seismology
Spatial Coverage (-9.000W, 53.000S, -8.000E, 54.000N); Ireland
Temporal Coverage Begin 2020-11-30T00:00:00Z
Temporal Coverage End 2021-03-30T00:00:00Z