Field geophysics uses physical principles to learn about the structure of the Earth through measurements made by students. We will make several excursions to the vicinity of the Caribou Mine above Nederland or to the Betasso Preserve just up Boulder Canyon for our field projects. Our goals are to learn the basics of the techniques, what kinds of targets they are good for, how to make field measurements and make simple reductions in the field to see if measurements are likely good, how to interpret the field measurements, and finally how to take advantage of the complementary nature of the different techniques. We will use seismic refraction, reflection, electrical resistivity, ground penetrating radar, gravity, and magnetics in the course.
Meeting Time: We have two classrooms reserved: 2:00 - 5 PM Tues (in 355 after the first meeting), 12:30 - 6 PM Thursday (in 265). Field trips will begin at 12:30 pm.
2009 schedule (will be changing so check back frequently)
Meeting Place:
GEOL4714 is for undergraduate credit.
GEOL5714 is for graduate credit. Usually 5714 is the same as 4714 but the student must complete a field final as well (this is gathering and interpreting data in a single afternoon of the student's choice at a specific field site announced to the student ahead of time).
GravMag 1.0.10 is available to the class as informed by email. This allows uncertainties to be used in the section window with magnetic data imported as delimited text and fixes a few other annoying bugs.
Also of interest, perhaps, is a pair of maps of the 2003-2009 magnetics data. One uses a nearest neighbor smoothing algorithm (I've tossed some of the really low values from a few profiles) and the other uses Delaney triangulation.
Due date now 10/13. Class on 10/8 optional to work on gravity. Magnetics lab now 10/13.
Meter constants:
- USGS meter 64: 1.04205 between 2800 and 2900
- CUB meter 235: 1.05527 between 2800 and 2900
2009 station locations
- Table of the final locations and all corrected terrain corrections (updated 10/6) (tab delimited) (Errors in 8 of the terrain corrections were found
1998-2008 Gravity data: As a tab-delimited table (corrected 10/6 - please USE 08-81-03, have dropped 08-157-03 from this table--it was the meter was off heat before measurement)
Map of 1998-2009 gravity stations on topo base. and detail of the area near Caribou Hill
5714 field final Octiber 27
Written final October 29, 1 pm, BESC 265.
Textbook is Burger, Sheehan and Jones's Introduction to Applied Geophysics: Exploring the Shallow Subsurface. Milsom's Field Geophysics is a handy field reference. We will be using the software from this new version of Burger in this class.
Course Information Online
Field how-tos:
Instructor: Prof. Craig Jones, Benson Earth Sciences 440C, (303-49) 2-6994
TA: David Culp, David.Culp@Colorado.EDU, office hours 1-3 Mondays
The 2002 class page from Dr. Sheehan's class is still online
Older stuff of interest
The Caribou Park area was the site of an illegal offroad rally 9/23/00; I've put some photos from 1998 and 2000 together on a special Mudfest page for your amusement.
C. H. Jones | CIRES | Dept. of Geological Sciences | Univ. of Colorado at Boulder
Last modified at Friday, November 20, 2009 4:26 PM
