Application of GIS on exploration of the strikes and dips of buried faults

Buried faults have drawn more and more attention of geologists by their important geological significance in structural geology and in engineering geology. But how to identify their existence and evaluate their strikes and dips and then proceed to establish the metallogenic model and outline the prospective regions in a study area have become an urgent problem. Gravity data and magnetic data carry information about basement tectonics, and remotely sensed data can be used to extract faults on the ground surface. The paper demonstrates a new multi-data integration method using gravity data, aerial magnetic data and remotely sensed data to solve the problem mentioned above in ARC/INFO, a world famous geographic information system developed by the Environmental Systems Research Institute of United States. The steps are as following: (1) data preparation, (2) correlative analysis between two of the above data types, (3) filtering processing with windows of different size in order to extract the existence of buried faults of different depths using the results of step (2), (4) use the spatial and statistical functions of ARC/INFO to identify the counterparts of a given buried fault in a different deep layer and evaluate its strike and dip values roughly.<>