Geophysical data acquisition - OGS

Transferring technology from the oil and gas industry to environmentalapplication is a goal we pursued within the MICA Project, funded by the “FondoTrieste”. We acquired a high-resolution 3D survey close to the Trieste airport, in anarea where the city aqueduct has several catchment wells. The tomographicinversion and imaging of this data showed not only a good correlation with theavailable stratigraphy from 3 wells, but also remarked the significant vertical andlateral variations of the layers overlying the water-saturated formations. This factproves the viability of 3D surveys for the protection of groundwater from pollution,and also their need: sparse 2D profiles would miss the area complexity;furthermore, drilling sparse exploration wells would be not only even lesssignificant (and probably more expensive), but could break the impermeablecovers over the groundwater pool, allowing it to be polluted by industrial oragricultural activities.Complementary to the seismic surveys, we carried out also a Georadar and a geoelectricsurvey, for integrating the elastic and electro-magnetic parameters. Ofcourse, the penetration scale of the different techniques is quite different (butcomplementary), and their integration into a consistent physical model isongoing. Partner of OGS within the MICA Project is GeoKarst, which is ageochemical company located in the Trieste Area Science Park. This company iscomplementing the OGS activity by analyzing the water origin and fluxes bymeasuring the isotopes it contains.The stratigraphyof 3 water well (above)matches the pre-stackdepth migrated section(below) obtained bytomographic velocitiesin a high-resolution3D survey.37