Towards remote sensing of sediment thickness and depth to bedrock in shallow seawater using airborne TEM^*

Abstract

Following a successful bathymetric mapping demonstration in a previous study, the potential of airborne EM for seafloor characterisation has been investigated. The sediment thickness inferred from 1D inversion of helicopter-borne time-domain electromagnetic (TEM) data has been compared with estimates based on marine seismic studies. Generally, the two estimates of sediment thickness, and hence depth to resistive bedrock, were in reasonable agreement when the seawater was ~20 m deep and the sediment was less than ~40 m thick. Inversion of noisy synthetic data showed that recovered models closely resemble the true models, even when the starting model is dissimilar to the true model, in keeping with the uniqueness theorem for EM soundings. The standard deviations associated with shallow seawater depths inferred from noisy synthetic data are about ± 5% of depth, comparable with the errors of approximately ± 1 m arising during inversion of real data. The corresponding uncertainty in depth-to-bedrock estimates, based on synthetic data inversion, is of order of ± 10%. The mean inverted depths of both seawater and sediment inferred from noisy synthetic data are accurate to ~1 m, illustrating the improvement in accuracy resulting from stacking. It is concluded that a carefully calibrated airborne TEM system has potential for surveying sediment thickness and bedrock topography, and for characterising seafloor resistivity in shallow coastal waters.