Prospecting and Evaluation of Underground Massive Ice by Ground-Penetrating Radar

Abstract

Data from geocryological studies of soil and rock massifs in permafrost zone are very important as a basis for predicting possible negative consequences associated with climate change. A promising technique for studying geocryological structures (various types of underground ice) is the ground-penetrating radar (GPR) method. This paper presents the applications of the GPR method to prospect and evaluate massive ice in a frozen rock mass. To study the features of GPR signals received during sounding of underground ice, a model of a single GPR trace for the structure “frozen rock-ice-frozen rock” was developed. As a result, regularities were established in the kinematic and dynamic characteristics of GPR signals at the upper and lower boundaries of massive ice, depending on its geometric parameters. The established features were confirmed by the results of computer and physical simulation of GPR measurements of a frozen rock mass model. The main result of the study was to obtain a set of criteria for identifying massive ice according to GPR measurements. The developed criteria will allow the use of GPR for a detailed study of the structure of permafrost rocks to prevent the development of dangerous cryogenic processes in undisturbed and urban areas of the Arctic.

Water Migration and Segregated Ice Formation in Frozen Ground: Current Advances and Future Perspectives

“…Another way is to estimate the ice content by geophysical technology or remote sensing methods, such as ground-penetrating radar (GPR) (Daniels et al, 1995;Lamoureux et al, 2018). However, the GPR method prefers to resolve wedge ice, massive ice, and ice-rich sediments rather than the individual ice lenses with small volume, and it needs to be combined with other means to improve the accuracy of detection (Fortier and Savard, 2010;Sokolov et al, 2020). Satellite remote sensing provides another method to continuously monitor the surface water condition of frozen soil in space via data assimilation (Mwangi et al, 2020;Szczykulska et al, 2021).…”

Investigations of polygonal patterned ground in continuous Antarctic permafrost by means of ground penetrating radar and electrical resistivity tomography: Some unexpected correlations

“…In general, the following tentative interpreting criteria to discriminate ice wedges and frost fissures can be proposed: Ice wedges should produce abrupt lateral phase changes due to the high reflectivity contrast and, possibly, low attenuated signals due to the low attenuation typical of clean ice, but different types of ice can produce very different signals 67,68 ; Frost fissures (i.e., wedges with the parent sediments inside) could have higher attenuation and possible internal layering due to different deformations that led to a secondary iso‐orientation of the clasts and the sandy materials. With this in mind and by exploiting the geophysical data validation at the two trenches locations, we infer that in the entire study area, while the polygon borders are quite clear, continuous, and well developed, the filling materials can be different even at lateral distances of just a few meters and in the same polygon network, with portions in which ice wedges are present, and other characterized by mainly sandy sediments with some pebbles filling the fissures.…”

GPR velocity correction method in transversely heterogeneous media based on CMP data

“…gprMax is an open‐source software that uses the FDTD method to simulate EM wave propagation and is used for the numerical simulations of GPR (Giannopoulos, 2005; Warren et al., 2016). gprMax is widely used because of its powerful function and simple operation (Jiang et al., 2023; Mihai et al., 2019; Özkap et al., 2020; Sokolov et al., 2020; Temlioglu & Erer, 2022).…”