Electrical Conductance Maps of the Great Basin, USA

Images of subsurface electrical conductivity are useful for locating fluids and other electrically conductive phases at depth in the Earth. This data release presents electrical conductance maps estimated from a 3D model of the Great Basin, USA, in five different depth ranges, spanning 2 to 200 km depth. Electrical conductance is the integration of electrical conductivity in a depth range. Great Basin electrical conductivity is estimated through 3D inverse modeling of over 800 publicly available magnetotelluric (MT) transfer functions. The transfer functions can be found on the electromagnetic transfer function repository hosted by the Incorporated Research Institutions of Seismology (IRIS) data management center (https://ds.iris.edu/spud/emtf, Kelbert et al. (2011) and Kelbert et al. (2018)), the geothermal data repository (https://gdr.openei.org/home), and Science Base. The inversion code ModEM (Egbert et al., 2012; Kelbert et al., 2014), run on the U.S. Geological Survey's high-performance computer Yeti, provides estimate of subsurface 3D electrical conductivity.
The following conductance layers are estimated: - gb_conductance_surface_tp.tif [2 - 12 km depth]
- gb_conductance_middle_crust_tp.tif [12 - 20 km depth] - gb_conductance_lower_crust_tp.tif [20 - 50 km depth] - gb_conductance_upper_mantle_tp.tif [50 - 90 km depth] - gb_conductance_mantle_tp.tif [90 - 200 km depth]
This work was undertaken as part of the INGENIOUS (Innovative Geothermal Exploration through Novel Investigations of Undiscovered Systems) project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Geothermal Technologies Office awarded to the University of Nevada, Reno. INGENIOUS is a multi-disciplinary, multi-institution effort to develop new methodologies and best practices to accelerate the discovery of new, commercially viable geothermal resources. This work was also supported by the U.S. Geological Survey Geothermal Resources Investigations Project (GRIP).