Autonomous underwater vehicle based marine multi-component self-potential method: observation scheme and navigational correction

Abstract. Marine self-potential (SP) investigation is an effective method to study deep-sea hydrothermal vents and seafloor sulfide deposits. At present, the commonly used marine self-potential instrument is a towed electrode array, large noise involves when the seafloor topography is complex, causing the greatly change of electrode distance and array attitude. In this paper, a new multi-component electric field observation system based on underwater autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) was introduced for the measurement of seafloor self-potential. The system was tested in a lake and the multi-component self-potential data were collected. Observed data involve the navigational information of AUV, which could be corrected using a rotation transform. After navigational correction, measured data can recover the location of the artificial source well using self-potential tomography. The experimental results showed that the new SP system can be applied to marine SP observations, providing an efficient and low-noise SP acquisition method for marine resources and environmental investigations.