Environmental applications of the IP method: Surveys of subsurface waste

Abstract Induced-polarization (IP) effects in electrical geophysical surveys have been used in mineral-exploration projects for many decades, but only in the past 15 years or so has IP in environmental geophysics become a more common, commercially applicable method. This is primarily because of improvements in the economics of the technique and in data quality resulting from equipment advances. One field of environmental applications in which the IP method has been particularly useful is the study of buried waste. In the past, IP data acquisition was relatively expensive, and as a result, many landfill IP surveys were limited in scope for budgetary reasons. With the improving economics of the method, however, extensive amounts of data have been acquired at more than 50 landfills. At one site alone, 95 lines of IP and resistivity data were acquired, and at another, more than 14,000 transmitter-receiver pairs were used. Examination of this large, diverse data set allows several interesting general conclusio...