Multidisdiplinary and multiscale geophysical and geochemical imaging of la palma island geothermal system.
Data
Acronym: GEOTHERPAL-CHEM
Reference: TED2021-131882B-C44
Partners: : Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM), Universidad de Barcelona (UB) y Instituto Tecnológico y de Energías Renovables (ITER)
Duration: 01/12/2022 to 31/05/2025
Budget: 74.750,00 €
Co-Financing: The State Research Agency (AEI), through the call for proposals for Strategic Projects Aimed at the Ecological and Digital Transitions, under the State Plan for Scientific, Technical and Innovation Research (2021–2023), as part of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan, for the year 2021.
Project overview
Gas geochemistry is one of the key tools in surface geothermal exploration. The ITER team has a proven track record in this field, with over two decades of experience and dozens of publications in international scientific journals to its credit.
The aim of this project is to compile existing information, collect new data and apply advanced processing techniques to better characterise La Palma’s geothermal system. ITER has been actively pursuing the objective of surface geothermal exploration on the island for many years.
To date, a significant body of geochemical data has been collected on the island. These consist mainly of measurements of diffuse emissions of CO2, He and H2; Rn studies; hydrogeochemical sampling; 3He/4He isotope ratios measured from the only site of visible gas seeps, Dos Aguas, up to the onset of the recent volcanic eruption; and soil concentrations of B and NH4. This database is a valuable starting point for future studies, but is not sufficient on its own to provide a reliable characterisation of the island’s geothermal potential.
One of the activities of this project will involve increasing the density of measurements in certain areas of interest. This phase will take place following a review of existing data, thereby enabling us to identify gaps in the dataset that need to be addressed through additional measurements. Furthermore, as part of this project, we will apply advanced multivariate techniques to perform data mining on the large volume of data collected to date. Among these, we plan to use dimensionality reduction techniques, such as PCA (Principal Component Analysis) and ICA (Independent Component Analysis), to identify relevant factors that may be of interest in characterising the geothermal potential of a specific area.
These results will be compared and integrated with the geophysical data collected and processed by the other sub-projects.
Project TED2021-131882B-C44 has been funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by the European Union’s “NextGenerationEU”/PRTR programme, “Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan – Funded by the European Union – Next GenerationEU”.
Related links:
Programme: Ayudas a proyectos estratégicos orientados a la transición ecológica y a la transición digital.
Subprogramme: Programa de Proyectos de I+D del Plan Estatal 2021
