| Abstract: | Thin sheet-like forms are common target bodies in geoelectric prospecting. Depending on their mineralogy and other factors these bodies may be relatively conductive or relatively resistive with respect to their surroundings. For suitably remote field points (relative to the thickness) these features manifest themselves geoelectrically in terms of their conductivity-thickness product for relatively conductive bodies or in terms of their resistivity-thickness product for resistive forms. While the case of a conductive sheet has received some attention in the geophysical literature, resistive sheets have been largely ignored. Accordingly an efficient technique to model the geoelectric responses of a resistive lamina is presented here. The technique involves representing the lamina in terms of a distribution of normally directed current dipole moment whose density is shown to satisfy an inhomogeneous Fredholm integral equation of the second kind. The technique is rigorously tested in a 2D environment and is shown to produce reliable and suitably accurate results. An application of the method is presented in which the apparent resistivity and chargeability responses measured with a gradient array over a dipping resistive ribbon are computed. These are compared with the responses observed over a relatively conductive ribbon in the same orientation. |
