One case study shows an important phenomenon: Active fault can cause subtle spectral features change of soil

Abstract

Buried fault identification in plains is one of the important and difficult problems in current active fault research. Seismic activity forces crustal fluid to migrate up, especially along faults, thereby altering the geochemical characteristics of faults. Hyperspectral remote sensing has an extremely high spectral resolution; data derived from hyperspectral remote sensing have the capacity to detect physicochemical characteristics for mining or the subtle recognition of different underground objects. It provides a new method to detect changes in the geochemical characteristics in the fault. This study is trying to locate the fault by spectrum feature. The Xiadian fault was chosen as the study area. Several samples across the fault were collected, and these samples were measured by an ASD Field Spec 3 spectrometer(Analytical Spectral Devices, Boulder, USA, produced in 2008). Continuum removal, the spectral classification method and the wavelet transform technique have been used for spectral analysis. It has been shown that the spectrum of soil in the fault zone has some special characteristics that are different from those of the spectrum away from fault. Four special spectral regions, 550–580 ​nm, 600–700 ​nm, 700–800 ​nm and 800–900 ​nm, have been extracted as the singular ranges. These individual ranges could be used for fault location in the plain area. There is weak absorption near 880 ​nm of the sample in the fault, indicating that Fe3+ content plays an important role in fault identification and that the iron valences can indicate the fault environment. This study also found that the spectral anomalies in space could reflect the intensity of active tectonics to a certain extent. Therefore, spectral features have the potential to identify a buried faults. This study is the first to use spectroscopic techniques to analyze active tectonics, and there is a new discovery. This new discovery provides the basis for the application of remote sensing in the study of active tectonics.

Keywords

• Hyperspectral
• Active tectonic investigation
• Geochemical
• Soil gas