Talk:Geophysical survey/Archive 1

Archive 1

Untitled

The former article was moved to the page "Archaeological geophysics," which better reflected its scope. This title is now freed for a more general article on geophysical survey.

Types of survey

The paragraph beginning "There are many types of Geophysical Surveys..." begins to enumerate a few methods, but I think there are more than can be mentioned within a paragraph. To mention only a few may give an unbalanced picture of the subject. Perhaps there should be a bulleted list with links, or short sections on the many different methods and/or applications. Tapatio (talk) 16:11, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

Merge into Exploration geophysics

Should this article be made a section within exploration geophysics? Most of the information in this article is contained within the other. Hamsterlopithecus (talk) 18:22, 25 January 2011 (UTC)

That's a tough question and I have wondered about it myself. The terms would appear to to be parallel, if not synonomous, but my sense is that they are not. "Exploration geophysics" seems to be most often associated studies of geological structure and searches for exploitable resources - disciplines that use geophysical surveys as a primary method. Also, I have never heard anyone in my field (archaeological geophysics) refer to what we do as "exploration geophysics," even though it could be considered as such by a stricly literal definition. I think we should get an exploration geophysicist to weigh in on how they use the terms, but I don't think that all applications of geophysical surveys can be comfortably lumped together as "exploration geophysics." Tapatio (talk) 15:51, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

I think that (in a perfect world) there should be a distinction between geophysical surveys carried out during exploration for resources of various kinds (oil, geothermal, mineral) and geophysical surveys being carried out to improve scientific understanding e.g. the depth of the moho, the presence and shape of intrusions and the details of archaeological sites. In reality, there is a huge amount of overlap between the two, but I think that they could exist together with Exploration geophysics page concentrating on how the techniques are used to find resources, leaving the details of the techniques more to this article. Mikenorton (talk) 18:01, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

Maybe we should change the name of the of the Exploration geophysics article to Applied geophysics. As Tapatio says, archaeological geophysics may not be part of "Exploration geophysics" but it is definitely a part of "Applied geophysics". Once the name is changed, we can merge Geophysical survey into Applied geophysics. Hamsterlopithecus (talk) 15:50, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

I don't think that "Applied geophysics" is synonymous with "Exploration Geophysics." "Applied geophysics" would seem to be a rather broad category that might include mineral exploration, archaeological prospection, engineering applications, and a lot of other fields. Geophysical survey is important as information-gathering tool in these fields, but not necessarily the only thing they do. That said, the scope of the "Exploration geophysics" page has always seemed uncomfortably broad, and "Applied geophysics" might be a better title. The problem would then arise of writing a more focused article on the important subject of exploration geophysics (which I am not qualified to do). Tapatio (talk) 16:51, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

I just saw that this is going on in parallel on talk:exploration_geophysics. Tapatio (talk) 17:12, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

Merge from Geophysical imaging

Geophysical imaging is a subset of geophysical survey with the sensors arrayed so they can be used for tomography. A discussion of the physical methods would be redundant, so it makes sense to replace the Geophysical imaging article by a Tomography section in Geophysical survey. RockMagnetist (talk) 20:55, 18 September 2011 (UTC)

Maybe you mean merge to Near-surface geophysics now ... Vsmith (talk) 19:50, 19 September 2011 (UTC)

Sorry for the confusion - I meant to delete (or archive?) this discussion. RockMagnetist (talk) 20:47, 19 September 2011 (UTC)