3D modeling and integration of heterogeneous geo-data

This paper tackles the volumetric representation of geophysical and geotechnical data, gathered during exploration surveys of the subsoil. The creation of a 3D model as support to geological interpretation has to take into account the specificity of the diverse input data, that are heterogeneous. Some data are massive, but cover the domain unevenly, e.g., structured along dense differently spaced lines, while others are very sparse, e.g., borehole locations with soil sampling and CPTU (Piezocone Penetration Test) locations. In this work, we focus on the exploration and analysis of underwater deposits. After a discussion about the data typically acquired in an offshore campaign, we present an automatic process to generate the subsurfaces and volume defining an underground deposit, starting from the identification of relevant morphological features in seismic data. In particular, data simplification and refinement based on geostatistics have been applied to generate regular 2D meshes from strongly anisotropic data, in order to improve the quality of the final 3D tetrahedral mesh. Furthermore, we also use geostatistics to predict geotechnical parameters from local surveys and estimate their distribution on the whole domain: in this way the 3D model will include relevant geological features of the deposit and allow extrapolating different geotechnical information with associated uncertainty. The volume characterization and its 3D inspection will improve the structural and stratigraphic interpretation of deposits, to support geological analysis and planning of future engineering activities.