• Economic and Environmental Geology
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• v.39 no.4 s.179
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• pp.441-450
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• 2006

The on-land seismic survey in Korea was begun in mid-1960s. Kim et al.(1967) of Korea Geological Survey reported on the result of gravity and seismic reflection surveys conducted in the Pohang area for the period of 1963-64 to assess its possibility of oil entrapment. Hyun and Kim (1966) carried out a refraction survey on the tunnel wall. Since then, the KGS geophysicists had conducted seismic surveys on Kyungsang sedimentary basin as a main project for several years. In 1970s, on-land seismic surveys had been conducted for various purposes such as site investigation for the nuclear power plants and industrial complex, exploration for ground water, mineral resources and underground tunnel. The first reflection survey with CMP acquisition was attempted in 1978 by using a digital recording system. But most of on-land seismic surveys had employed the refraction method until 1980s. In 1990s, high resolution reflection and various borehole seismic surveys such as tomography, uphole, downhole, cross-hole methods have been attempted by universities and engineering companies. The applications of on-land seismic surveys have been enlarged for both academic and industrial purposes such as investigation of geologic structure of the fault and tidal flat area, construction of highway, railroad and dam, geothermal energy and mineral resource exploration, environmental assessment for waste disposal sites and archaeological investigations. In 2002, the first crustal seismic survey was carried out on the profile of 294km length across the whole peninsular. It is expected that the advanced technology and experience acquired through offshore seismic surveys, which have been conducted in continental shelf of Korea and foreign oil fields, will stimulate the more active on-land seismic explorations.

• Geophysics and Geophysical Exploration
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.53-58
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• 2013

It was introduced a seismic mini-array that could monitor microseismicity efficiently and analyzed seismic data obtained from the mini-array that was operated from December 19, 2012 to January 9, 2013. The mini-array consisted of a six channel data logger, a central 3 components seismometer, and a tripartite array of vertical sensors centered around the 3 components seismometer as an equilateral triangle with about 100 m aperture. All seismometers that had the same instrument response were connected a 6 channel data logger, which was set to record seismograms at a sampling rate of 200 sps. During the three weeks of campaign, a total of 16 microearthquakes were detected. Using time differences of P wave arrivals from the vertical components, S-P time from 3 components seismometers, and back azimuth from the seismic array analysis, it was possible to locate the hypocenter of the microearthquake even with one seismic miniarray. The epicenters of two nearest microearthquakes were a quarry site located 1.3 km from the mini-array. The records of quarry blasting confirmed the our analysis.

• Geophysics and Geophysical Exploration
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.304-315
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• 2006

We have examined the applicability of f-k analysis to the GPR direct wave measurement for water content to characterize vadose zone condition. When the vadose zone consists of a dry surface layer over wet substratum, we obtained f-k spectra where most of the energy is bounded by the air and dry soil velocities. In this case, dry soil velocity was successfully estimated by using high frequency data. On the other hands, when wet soil overlies dry substratum, the f-k spectra show a contrasting response where most of the energy travels with the velocity bounded by dry and wet soil velocities. In this case, the radar waves are trapped and guided within wet soil layer, exhibiting velocity dispersion. By adopting modal propagation theory, we could formulae a simple inversion code to find two layer's dielectric constants as well as layer thickness. By inverting the velocity dispersion curve obtained from f-k spectra of synthetic modeling data, we could obtain good estimates of dielectric constants of each layer as well as first layer thickness. Moreover, we could obtain more accurate results by including the higher mode data. We expect this method will be useful to get the quantitative property of real subsurface when the field condition is similar.

• Geophysics and Geophysical Exploration
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.328-337
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• 2009

To investigate the relation between pore fluid conductivity and bulk resistivity of a rock sample it is assumed that electrolyte solution perfectly substitute the pore fluid that occupied the pore space within the sample in general. In this study, it is investigated that how much can the electrolyte solution substitute the pore fluid by repeating the same saturation process. Four kinds of NaCl solutions of 8, 160, 3200, 64000 ${\mu}S$/cm are used. The saturation process has repeated four times for each electrolyte in increasing conductivity order first then four times each in decreasing order. The more the saturation process repeated with the same electrolyte, the more electrolyte solution substitute the pore fluid. Geometric mean of bulk resistivity in increasing and decreasing orders with the same electrolyte solution is assumed to be mostly close to the bulk resistivity with perfect substitution. Bulk resistivity measurements for both increasing and decreasing order differs within 10% to the geometric mean when repeating the saturation process 4 times while maximum 40% difference is observed when single saturation process for each electrolyte solution with increasing order. The modified parallel resistant model can generally represent the relations between pore fluid resistivity and bulk resistivity in the experiment, but more experimental data with various rock samples with different porosity is needed to generalize the model.

• Geophysics and Geophysical Exploration
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.121-130
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• 2016

Several factors are discussed that should be considered in measuring thermal conductivity of rock cores with a PEDB (potable electronic divided bar) system, which is relatively accurate and easy to operate, and can measure the thermal conductivity of rock cores for various diameters. Then the system is applied to measure thermal conductivity of 70 rock cores from Ulleung Island. Air temperature affects most on the thermal conductivity measurements, so that it is very important to minimize the temperature change during the measurement. Other factors such as the temperature of heat source, averaging time window on the thermal conductivity measurements do not affect much compared to air temperature. Slightly higher thermal conductivity is measured when using the thermal contact paste between the sample and heat source or heat sink. Especially, rock cores with irregular surface showed bigger difference. Repeatability showed less than ${\pm}0.3%$ for standard samples and less than ${\pm}4%$ for rock samples, respectively, when the room temperature changes within $1^{\circ}C$ during the measurements. Thermal conductivity of the rock cores from Ulleung Island roughly increases as depth increases but does not show any dependency on the rock types.

• Geophysics and Geophysical Exploration
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.378-387
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• 2010

We present the results of laboratory measurement of porosity and electrical resistivity for the samples collected near marine hydrothermal deposit to provide fundamental perspective of physical properties for future electromagnetic survey. The rock cores are sampled from the host rock, pumice, hydrothermal altered zone, and chimney. These samples are featured as easily brittle, rough surface with large pores, having components easily solvable in the water. We suggest systematic approach for measuring weights, volumes of core samples to calculate density and porosity. Measurements reveal that the resistivities of black host rock, gray host rock, pumice and chimney are 102, 39, 11, 0.1 ohm-m, respectively, when the core samples are saturated with saline water of $32,000\;{\mu}S$/cm (0.5 ohm-m) at temperature of $2.5^{\circ}C$ and these correspond to the factors of 5 for sea water, 110 for pumice and 390~1020 for host rocks with respect to the resistivity of chimney. We also confirm that resistivity of rock samples saturated with water decrease with temperature linearly over the temperature range of $20{\sim}80^{\circ}C$.

• Geophysics and Geophysical Exploration
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.171-180
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• 2015

Electrical resistivity of 23 core samples from Ulleung Island at dry or saturated condition has been measured along with dry density and effective porosity, and the relations between the properties has also been discussed. Upper and lower bounds of electrical resistivity at room temperature can be provided by the dry- and saturated-resistivity, respectively. Injecting nitrogen gas to the pore space at the very end of drying process can prevent humid air from getting into the pore space, so that measurement of dry-resistivity can be less affected by humidity in the air. Dry density and porosity have very close correlation; the ratio between increase of porosity and the decrease of density showed distinct relation to the rock types, such that basaltic rocks showed higher ratio while trachytic rocks showed lower. Saturated resistivity showed close correlation to density and effective porosity of the rock sample, while dry resistivity didn't.

• Geophysics and Geophysical Exploration
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.39-53
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• 2015

Analysis of multi-channel seismic reflection profiles acquired from the southwestern margin of Ulleung Basin reveals that the cut and fill structures, which show U-shaped or V-shaped morphology, occur on variable size. The cut and fill structure mostly consists of fine-grained sediments on the well data and is characterized by transparent or semitransparent seismic facies on the seismic section. Such cut and fill structures dominantly occur in the syn-compressional megasequence (MSQ3), which was deposited during basin deformation of late Miocene, among the four megasequences of the study area. These cut and fill structures can be divided into three groups based on their size and formation time. The cut and fill structures of Group I were formed when Dolgorae structure was active, and occurred on a small scale. The cut and fill structures of group II were formed when both Dolgorae structure and Gorae V structure were active, and the number and size of those increased compared with group I. The cut and fill structures of group III were formed when Dolgorae structure was weaken gradually but Gorae V structure kept active, and the number and size of those decreased in comparison with group II. Consequently the cut and fill structures in the southwestern margin of Ulleung basin are interpreted as submarine canyon based on spatial distribution, size and fill sediment. They were controlled by the tectonic movement in response to basin closure and tectonic-induced sediment supply variation.

• Geophysics and Geophysical Exploration
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.227-233
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• 2011

Attention has been focused on geothermal energy as an alternative energy because it is continuously operable without external supply. Most of geothermal anomalies in Korea are related to deep circulation of groundwater through a fracture system in granite area. Therefore it is very important to understand the distribution of the fracture system which is the main channel of ground water. In this research, we constructed the velocity models with a fracture system and the layered sediments, respectively, and generated synthetic data sets with them to verify the presented vertical seismic profiling (VSP) preprocessing scheme. We compared the results from conventional VSP preprocessing flow to those from VSP preprocessing flow considering fracture system. We noticed that the preprocessing flow considering fracture system retains more sufficient signal including down-going wave than conventional preprocessing. In addition, we applied 3D VSP prestack phase screen migration to the preprocessed reversed VSP (RVSP) data from Seokmo Island so that we were able to image fracture structure of the geothermal site in Seokmo Island.

• Economic and Environmental Geology
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• v.52 no.5
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• pp.323-336
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• 2019

The Mesozoic activity on the Korean Peninsula is mainly represented by the Triassic post-collisional, Jurassic orogenic, and Cretaceous post-orogenic igneous activities. The diversity of mineralization by each geological period came from various geothermal systems derived from the geochemical characteristics of magma with different emplacement depth. The Cretaceous metallic mineralization has been carried out over a wide range of time periods from ca. 115 to 45 Ma (main stage; ca. 100 to 60 Ma) related to post-orogenic igneous activity, and spatial distribution patterns of most metal deposits are concentrated along small granitic stocks. The late Cretaceous metal deposits in the Gyeonggi and Yeongnam massifs are generally distributed along the boundary among the Gongju-Eumseong fault system and the Yeongdong-Gwangju fault system and the Gyeongsang Basin, most of them are in the form of a distal epithermal~mesothermal Au-Ag vein or a transitional mesothermal Zn-Pb-Cu vein. On the other hand, diverse metal commodities in the Taebaeg Basin, the Okcheon metamorphic belt and the Gyeongsang Basin are produced from various deposit types such as skarn, carbonate-replacement, vein, porphyry, breccia pipe, and Carlin type. In the late Cretaceous metallic mineralization, various mineral deposits and commodities were induced not only by the pathway of the hydrothermal solution, but also by the diversity of precipitation environment in the proximity difference of the granitic rocks. The diversity of these types of Cretaceous deposits is fundamentally dependent on the geochemical characteristics such as degree of differentiation and oxidation state of related igneous rocks, and ore-forming fluids generally exhibit the evolutionary characteristics of intermediate- to low-sulfur hydrothermal fluids.