Groundwater Depth and Fracture Pattern Determination

Lawrence L. Malinconico

Lafayette College

This activity has been reviewed by 2 review processes (view details)

This activity was selected for the On the Cutting Edge Reviewed Teaching Collection

This activity has received positive reviews in a peer review process involving five review categories. The five categories included in the process are
- Scientific Accuracy
- Alignment of Learning Goals, Activities, and Assessments
- Pedagogic Effectiveness
- Robustness (usability and dependability of all components)
- Completeness of the ActivitySheet web page
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This activity has benefited from input from faculty educators beyond the author through a review and suggestion process. This review took place as a part of a faculty professional development workshop where groups of faculty reviewed each others' activities and offered feedback and ideas for improvements. To learn more about the process On the Cutting Edge uses for activity review, see http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/review.html.

Initial Publication Date: July 5, 2007 | Reviewed: October 31, 2012 (see revision history: 2 events)

Summary

Learning to use the resistivity methodology for both vertical profiling and horizontal mapping.

Electrical Conductivity/Resistivity, Exploration Methods, Field ...(more) | College Lower (13-14), College Upper (15-16)

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Context

Audience

Undergraduate course in applied geophysics
Designed for a geophysics course

Skills and concepts that students must have mastered

Understanding about the workings of spreadsheets and charting. They will have been exposed to the concepts related to shallow resistivity surveys.

How the activity is situated in the course

This is a stand alone exercise that is part of the field portion of the course. The students are divided up into manageable groups and each group conducts their own field survey. Each individual student is then responsible for the submission of a project report.

Goals

Content/concepts goals for this activity

The objective of this project is to expose the students to the field methods used in resistivity surveying. They conduct both a vertical sounding as well as a mapping application. The only difference with this exercise and a true mapping application is that they stay in one place and look for variations in the resistivity with magnetic bearing.

Higher order thinking skills goals for this activity

The analysis and interpretation requires them to use the collected geophysical data to measure not just the level of the groundwater table, but use the existence of groundwater in the rocks and the variance of the resistivity to interpret local structure.

Other skills goals for this activity

Working as a team
Report writing

Description of the activity/assignment

Working in teams, the students begin by conducting a vertical resistivty sounding to determine the depth to the water table. This can be checked because the survey is done in the middle of an existing well field. Using the depth determined, the students then conduct the equivalent of horizontal resistivity survey using a fixed "a" spacing. Instead of making a map they collect data at 10-degree intervals rotating the array around a central point. This provides them with information about how the resistivity varies with magnetic bearing and they then have to relate that to an interpretation of the local structure (fracture patterns). Each student has to submit an individual report which includes an interpretation of the data.
Uses geophysics to solve problems in other fields