A new approach to shallow-depth electromagnetic sounding

Abstract This paper presents an extensive review of currently available shallow-depth portable geophysical instrumentation for electromagnetic induction sounding and profiling and the main technical characteristics of the devices. A new ground-based multicoil shallow-depth device with a special arrangement of receiver coils is considered. The latter are placed on the line where the vertical component of the magnetic field from the source coil is zero. The spacing between the source and the receivers is used as a sounding parameter, along with a frequency. This increases the efficiency of the study of the upper section and the contrast between the sounding curves, which simplifies their interpretation. In studies of local anomalous objects, the use of the proposed method and instrumentation significantly improves the quality of geophysical data. The increase in sounding efficiency provided by these devices is demonstrated on both synthetic and real field data.