Sunday Morning Insight; Using Muon Tomography to Image Salt Domes ?

In Louisana and Texas; there is an interest in imaging salt domes. This is for two reasons: an industrial one as oil and gas deposits seem to be neighbors to these structures and an environmental one which can be briefly summarized in these two videos of the 1980 Lake Peigneur sinkhole disaster and the recent appearance of a sinkhole in  Napoleonville, LA.
 


 

What is a salt dome and why it matters that it collapses ? In that region it may be a sign that there is a more structural connection to the Gulf of Mexico since as soon as water hits salt; the structural dome becomes liquid and unstable.     There are currently two majors means of performing this imaging: Acoustic/Seismic imaging and gravity. Both involve dilling most of the time since performing the survey from the surface only makes it hard to image the near vertical structure of the dome. But as we know and see from the sinkhole examples, in some cases drilling may not be appropriate. Here is another idea that ought to be investigated and which could provide a richer set of elements : Muon Tomography [2].  

from [5]

from [4]

from [6]

[1] BHGM Salt Dome Delineation - Micro-g LaCoste Gravity Meters

[2] Sunday Morning Insight: Muon Tomography as a Moore's Law Enabled Technology

[3] Imaging dipping sediments at a salt dome flank - VSP seismic interferometry and reverse-time 

migration Rongrong Lu, Mark Willis, Xander Campman, Jonathan Ajo-Franklin, M. Nafi Toksöz, ERL, MIT

[4] DIAPHANE setup at the Etna volcano from DIAPHANE web site devoted to the "Development of cosmic-ray muons tomography in geophysics"

[5] Minato,S. (1988) Feasibility of cosmic-ray radiography: A case study of a temple gate as a testpiece, Materials Evaluation, 46: 1468-1470.

{6] Muons tomography applied to geosciences and volcanology J. Marteau, D. Gibert, N. Lesparre, F. Nicollin, P. Noli, F. Giacoppo

[7] Imaging Maya Pyramids and Other Large Things with Cosmic Ray Muons, University of Texas Maya Muon Tomography

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