Review of PRACTICAL MAGNETOTELLURICS

BAI Deng-Hai
Institute of Geology & Geophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100029, China

PRACTICAL MAGNETOTELLURICS by Fiona Simpson and Karsten Bahr. ISBN: 0 521 81727 7 (hardback) It is dicult for scientic issues to be depicted precisely in a very simple, vivid and illustrative way but PRACTICAL MAGNETOTELLURICS does exactly that. After reading the book, I realized humor is not only a patent of novelists. As a special book on magnetotellurics (MT), PRACTICAL MAGNETOTELLURICS does not adopt the conventional format of lling the pages with hackneyed and stereotyped expressions and long equations, but emphasizes the basic principles of MT and scientic meanings of parameters, especially on how to get good data and reasonable models which is really of practical value to students and eld workers. That is why I like the book. As a worker of electromagnetic (EM) methods, I often need to explain to beginning scientists interested at MT work or EM studies why we can detect the earths electric structure using EM signals and how the signals diuse into the earth. However, since the EM signals can neither be seen by eyes no touched by hands directly, it is a dicult challenge to nd a way to communicate to our audience what we mean without resorting to abstract equations or terminology. I learned a simple way to take up this challenge from this book. We never forget the experience in the kitchen: heat the oven to let oil or water boil, then immerse a 2kg of prime beef cut in it. Remove it after 15min and cut in two halves. We can see the outermost 2cm is cooked but the inner remains raw. This tells us that 2cm is the penetration depth of the thermal eld with 15min period in beef. A shorter period would lead to a smaller penetration depth and a longer period would penetrate deeper. This is the way that the book explains a scientic concept and this is the style of the book that impressed me the most. Though MT is undoubtedly a powerful tool for detecting the earths electrical structure, there are still some outstanding problems of fundamental importance in earth science. This book does not spend to discuss in detail the successful case studies which are well known to all, but instead the diculties and limitations of the method are addressed. In particular, the discussions of some basic questions are inspiring and will be very important to students and eld workers. As a popular indication of the dimensionality of earth, skew < 0.2[1] or < 0.3[2] has been employed in the literature as an indicator of the deviation of 1-D or 2-D models from the real earth. This book tells us that this may be a misuse of skew because it is only a necessary but not a sucient condition of a regional 2-D structure. This would lead to some serious questions: What is the sucient indication for 1-D or 2-D earth or are there no such conditions in the real earth? Are the previous 1-D and 2-D models correct? We have got no knowledge about that so far. It seams that, from the book, we have to examine the eectiveness of 1-D and 2-D interpretations because the real earth is usually 3-D. Static shift in MT apparent resistivities is one of the biggest diculties in the use of MT method. For the correction of static shift, the book recommended three major techniques and presents very good discussions, viz: (i) If static shift on MT curves arises from near-surface heterogeneities (such as in shallow measurements) then it can be corrected using TEM or DC data. But how to operate the correction remains a question. One is to directly compare the apparent resistivity curves of TEM and MT[3] and the other is to compare the 1-D inverted results of both TEM and MT data[4] . Either of the two methods is used, it is dicult to determine the shift for a multi-dimensional environment because TEM and DC have only one apparent resistivity curve while MT has two components (TE and TM). Usually for practical MT data we do not know how the static shifts occur on apparent resistivity curves (TE, TM or both?). (ii) Averaging technique tends to give relative values of static shift. This correction can help to preserve the correct form of an anomaly in a multi-dimensional model,
E-mail: dhbai@mail.igcas.ac.cn

while the real conductance and depth may be inaccurate. Averaging is a statistical technique so that enough dense measurements are needed. (iii) If the periods of measurements are very long (for example T > 105 s), then long period correction can be employed to shift all the apparent resistivity curves to the same level at long periods. This technique relies on the assumption that there is a standard global conductive transition zone at mid-mantle. In practice, long-period correction is dicult to use for the eld data because most of the measurements are limited to periods less than 104 s. We see that every of the above mentioned techniques for static shift correction is only eective for some special cases. It is suggested in this book that when we choose appropriate methods for correcting static shift, we have to consider the target depth that we are interested in modeling. In complex 3-D environments, nearsurface corrections may be inadequate if long period data and deep structures are of interest. On the other hand, short-period apparent resistivities may be biased if long-period correction is applied in an environment where data are distorted by deep seated heterogeneities. In fact, at the beginning, static shift was dened as the eect of near-surface local inhomogeneities. This book proved by model calculations that this concept may be fallacious. Deep seated heterogeneities may also cause static shifts at longer periods where the penetration depth is deeper than the anomalous body. In this case, it is dicult to identify the static shift especially for limited frequency band measurements. Even for static shift from near-surface heterogeneities, the correction by TEM or DC data is also suspicious from the results of model calculation[5] . It is clear that to overcome this problem we still have a long way to go. Maybe the 3-D technique is the only way to go. How many strike directions does an earth structure have? This is a very strange but practical question. Principal electromagnetic direction is usually linked to geological strike. We have found many cases where the major electromagnetic direction not only changes laterally but also with depth. Generally we deem it an obstacle to 2-D modeling so that regional average strike searched by a proper decomposition is taken as a simplication[2,6] . This is a powerless choice before the practical use of 3-D techniques because some very important information will be lost. Actually, as argued in this book, MT data can potentially constrain directionality and its source better than seismological datasomething that should be viewed as an asset. This is a new point of view to apply the MT data and one of the highlights in this book. Besides the above issues, some other practical questions/arguments have been probed from dierent angles in the book. How to explain the dierence between the measured MT data and the laboratory data? How to understand the dierence between MT and TEM/DC? What is the link of MT to other geophysical methods? What is the implication of EM models for earths structure, tectonics and geodynamics? If you read the book, I cannot ensure that you will get absolutely correct answers, but you will get some insights into these interesting questions. Henceforth, if my students ask me what MT really is about, I will ask them to read the book Practical Magnetotellurics. It is really practical. REFERENCES
[1] Reddy I K, Rankin D, Phillips R J. Three-dimensional modeling in magnetotelluric and magnetic variational sounding. Geophys. J. R. Astr. Soc., 1977, 51: 313325 [2] Bahr K. Geological noise in magnetotelluric data: a classication of distortion types. Phys. Earth Planet. Inter., 1991, 66: 2438 [3] Sternberg B K, Washburne J C, Pellerin L. Correction for the static shift in magnetotellurics using transient electromagnetic soundings. Geophysics, 1988, 53: 14591468 [4] Pellerin L, Hohmann G W. Transient electromagnetic inversion: A remedy for magnetotelluric static shifts. Geophysics, 1990, 55: 12421250 [5] Bigalke J. Analysis of conductivity of random media using DC, MT and TEM. Geophysics, 2003, 68: 506515 [6] Groom R W, Bailey R C. Decomposition of the magnetotelluric impedance tensor in the presence of local threedimensional galvanic distortion. J. Geophys. Res., 1989, 94: 19131925