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Abstract:
The interdisciplinary DeepEarthShape project focusses on the weathering zone with drillings and geophysical, geochemical and geobiological approaches. The weathering zone is the uppermost part of the Earth's crust where rocks and soils experience breakdown through the impact of air/gases, water and/or biological organisms. The full picture of weathering processes and our insight into the critical zone is still limited. Since some of the properties of the weathering zone seem to be linked with climate, a set of sites is studied within the framework of the DFG Special Priority Program 1803 belonging to different climate zones and thus experience different vegetation, precipitation and erosion.
We utilised a combination of seismics and Radio-Magnetotelluric (RMT) measurements along ~200m long profiles at three study sites in Chile. For the RMT experiment, we used a horizontal magnetic dipole transmitter together with a nearby MT station. To develop the method into an applicable tool for this kind of inter-disciplinary studies, we show RMT results at different stages: Experimental layout tuned with synthetic simulations, RMT data processing using machine learning approaches. And finally, we will show and discuss 2D and 3D inversion results together with geophysical logging data and lab measurements. First results indicate that we can image precipitation and shallow fluid enhanced zones and provide crucial information for other disciplines. Minor faults and folds can be traced into the active weathering zone and linked with surface and borehole information.
