Innovative Exploration Methods for Minerals, Oil, Gas, and Groundwater for Sustainable Development - Subchapter 3.1: Self-potential: A low-cost geophysical method in investigating groundwater and contaminant plume

The potable groundwater, sans any contaminant, is a valuable resource that plays significant role in the human society, by improving general economy, human development index, and public health. Self-potential, an inexpensive geophysical method, is best suited in investigating groundwater flow and mapping a contaminated zone in the subsurface. The varieties of source mechanism of self-potential anomaly help in studying groundwater flow, and also in mapping a zone affected by a contaminant plume. Despite such advantages, there are potential challenges both in measuring and interpreting self-potential anomaly data. These are due to noise contamination in measurements, presence of various physicochemical conditions causing variability in the measured electric field, and multiplicity of source mechanisms causing hindrance in interpretation. The appropriate measurement technique including description of the design of instrument and accessories, the data processing steps, the algorithm to remove noise in data, and interpretation aspects of self-potential anomaly are discussed.