В монографии изложены основы физико-математической теории геоэлектрохимических методов разведки, нацеленных на решение практической задачи - дистанционной характеристики состава и масштабов геологических образований, в первую очередь рудных объектов. Эти методы, базирующиеся до сих пор преимущественно на эмпирически установленных закономерностях, получают в данной книге теоретическое обоснование, позволяющее приблизиться к строгим количественным оценкам запасов, к установлению геометрических размеров и элементов залегания геологических объектов.
Для научных и инженерно-технических работников геологогеофизического профиля

Все, конечно, знают, какую важную роль играет наука как в обороне, так и в повседневной мирной жизни. Вся наша экономика развивается в зависимости от непрерывного технического прогресса. Достаточно привести лишь такой характерный пример: восемьдесят тысяч служащих компании «Дженерал Электрик» в настоящее время участвуют в выпуске продукции, даже не существовавшей до окончания второй мировой войны.
Хорошо известно важное значение такой науки, как медицина, ведущей нас по пути искоренения болезней и продления жизни человека.
Но, несмотря на все успехи науки, Соединенные Штаты испытывают серьезную нехватку в ученых и инженерах. Заинтересовать наукой как можно большее число молодых людей — вот наиболее актуальная проблема, которая стоит перед нами. <...>

Earth sciences data are typically distributed in space and/or in time. Knowledge of an attribute value, say, a mineral grade or a pollutant concentration, is thus of little interest unless location and/or time of measurement are known and accounted for in the data analysis. Geostatistics provides a set of statistical tools for incorporating the spatial and temporal coordinates of observations in data processing.

Geochronology, including thermochronology, is an essential component of practically all modern Earth and planetary science and provides fundamental information for many other areas, including archeology, marine sciences, and ecology. Geochronology establishes the timing of critical events ranging from the age of the Earth to stratigraphic boundaries, and it provides unique constraints on the pace and dynamics of processes ranging from condensation of the solar nebula to planetary differentiation to surface exposure to biologic evolution. Given that Earth and planetary scientists commonly seek to understand relationships between events or phenomena for which physical evidence is incomplete or ambiguous, establishing temporal relationships through geochronology often provides a substantial basis for causality arguments.

Although the concept of geochronology has existed for millennia, and the particular name has been around since 1893, most scientists would probably agree that the modern practice or discipline is based on application of radioisotopic (or cosmogenic) systems in natural materials, which has existed for only a little more than a century (or less). Even into the 20th century, the geologic timescale floated freely in time. Geologists had established sequences of evolutionary and orogenic events in the rock record, but numerical estimates ranged widely, more so further back in geologic history. Without precise dates, only poorly constrained arguments could be made about the relative durations and the time separating major events in the geologic record. Likewise, prior to radioisotopic methods, the best available estimates for the age of the Earth (and solar system) disagreed by several orders of magnitude. The rather sudden recognition of nuclear structure and radioactive decay around the beginning of the 20th century, changed Earth and planetary science fundamentally. The very first radioisotopic dates measured increased the previously deduced minimum age of the Earth by about an order of magnitude, and subsequent work, less than 100 years ago, increased it by another factor of ten. <...>

This text intends to be a technical one. This means that techniques to solve identified problems will be presented. As the theory which serves as a basis for these techniques is very new, and relatively unfamiliar to the mineral industry, several chapters or sections will be devoted to it. These two ideas of a technique and a theory have been my guideline in preparing this course on the geostatistical estimation of mineral resources. The main target was to stay, as much as possible, close to the practical problems. This is the reason for the many examples which are intermeshed with the text; however, in many cases, staying t o o close t o a problem obscures the broader frame into which a question has to be asked before finding a correct answer. This is the reason for some theoretical digressions, which may seem to some as an attempt to try and make things look complicated. Certainly, in a particular mine, many problems can be solved without a total understanding of the complete theory. On the other hand, when one considers all the problems occurring in different mines, one cannot hope to solve them without having a good grasp, a synthetic view of the theory of regionalized variables as developed by G. Matheron in France, the most advanced developments of which have just been published in the Proceedings of a N.A.T.O. Advanced Study Institute (Guarascio, Huijbregts, David, 1976) <...>

A typical debris flow is a torrential flow of a mixture of water, mud and debris that suddenly pushes ahead with a vanguard of huge, jostling and roaring boulders. It is certainly a very fearful phenomenon that causes disasters, but it is also truly a wonder of nature exciting the curiosity of researchers as to how such a phenomenon can arise. The phenomena themselves had been recognized since ancient times in Japan and given various mnemonic names to make people aware of the dangers. Although there were several detailed witness records around in 1965 when I began working for the Disaster Prevention Research Institute of Kyoto University (hereafter called DPRI), the characteristics and mechanisms of debris flows were still vague, and it was called a ‘phantasmal disaster’.

Engineering systems must be designed to withstand the actual and probable loads that may be imposed on them. Hence the wall of a dam must be of adequate strength to hold out mainly the reservoir water pressure but also to withstand other loads, such as seismic occasional shocks, thermal expansions/contractions, and many others. A tennis racket is designed to take dynamic and impact loads imposed by a fast-moving flying tennis ball. It must also be adequately designed to withstand impact loads when incidentally hitting a hard ground. An oil drilling equipment must be designed to suitably and adequately drill through different types of rock materials, but at the same time ensuring that its imposing loads would not cause rock formation integrity affecting the stability of the drilled well. <...>

The distribution of ore grades within a deposit is of mixed character, being partly structured and partly random. On one hand, the mineralizing process has an overall structure and follows certain laws, either geological or metallogenic; in particular, zones of rich and poor grades always exist, and this is possible only if the variability of grades possesses a certain degree of continuity. Depending upon the type of ore deposit, this degree of continuity will be more or less marked, but it will always exist; mining engineers can indeed be thankful for this fact because, otherwise, no local estimation and, consequently, no selection would be possible. However, even though mineralization is never so chaotic as to preclude all forms of forecasting, it is never regular enough to allow the use of a deterministic forecasting technique . This is why a scientific (at least, simply realistic) estimation must necessarily take into account both features - structure and randomness inherent in any deposit. Since geologists stress the first of these two aspects, and statisticians stress the second, I proposed, over 15 years ago, the name geostatistics to designate the field which synthetizes these two features and opens the way to the solution of problems of evaluation of mining deposits <...>

This chapter discusses the influence of causal factors for landslide hazard mapping and stability of the prediction results. Among many quantitative models, we consider a model based on the theory of fuzzy sets with the algebraic sum operator. In the model, layers of geoscience maps represent the spatial information used for the prediction of areas in which the geomorphologic setting is similar to the ones in which a particular type of mass movement has taken place.