New method for estimating strike and dip based on structural expansion orientation for 3D geological modeling

Abstract

Strike and dip are essential to the description of geological features and therefore play important roles in 3D geological modeling. Unevenly and sparsely measured orientations from geological field mapping pose problems for the geological modeling, especially for covered and deep areas. This study developed a new method for estimating strike and dip based on structural expansion orientation, which can be automatically extracted from both geological and geophysical maps or profiles. Specifically, strike and dip can be estimated by minimizing an objective function composed of the included angle between the strike and dip and the leave-one-out cross-validation strike and dip. We used angle parameterization to reduce dimensionality and proposed a quasi-gradient descent (QGD) method to rapidly obtain a near-optimal solution, improving the time-efficiency and accuracy of objective function optimization with the particle swarm method. A synthetic basin fold model was subsequently used to test the proposed method, and the results showed that the strike and dip estimates were close to the true values. Finally, the proposed method was applied to a real fold structure largely covered by Cainozoic sediments in Australia. The strikes and dips estimated by the proposed method conformed to the actual geological structures more than those of the vector interpolation method did. As expected, the results of 3D geological implicit interface modeling and the strike and dip vector field were much improved by the addition of estimated strikes and dips.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

strike and dip / structural expansion orientation / leave-one-out cross-validation / covered area

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Acknowledgments

This research was jointly supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (No. 2019YFC0605102) and the National Nartural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 41972307).

Computer code availability

The method in this article is already included in a matlab package named SEOSD. This toolbox includes the following features: estimate the strike and dip at structural expansion orientation points, using the moment of inertia method to extract structural expansion orientation from multi-sources (geological map and profile, aero-magnetic, etc.), create the vector field texture of strike and dip vector field, and implicit surface modeling method (RBF-based). The code was developed under Matlab^® (Version, 2017a). All the code was tested in Windows OS. It is intended to be open source and available by contacting Yabo Zhao ([e-mail]), or alternatively downloadable from its GitHub repository (available at GitHub website).

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