Urban geophysics ? a review

Abstract

Community problems such as soil and groundwater contamination by toxic waste and other pollutants, landslides, disruption of buildings and roadways due to ground subsidence, the need to detect buried objects such as pipes and cables and for crime scene investigations, radon gas accumulation in buildings, and stray radioactive sources are all problems which can be usefully investigated by traditional geophysical methods. Their remote-sensing ability offers advantages over more invasive and disruptive alternatives. The most appropriate methods include magnetics, ground penetrating radar, electrical, electromagnetic, radiometrics and to a lesser degree, seismic and micro-gravity techniques. The urban situations in which these methods are applied are often challenging due to such factors as a large amount of background noise, confined spaces to work in and shallow targets, often in highly disturbed ground. Special approaches and methods of interpreting the data are therefore sometimes required. As the applications of these techniques become more widely accepted it can be expected that new methods and ways of interpreting the results will be developed.