Electrical resistance tomography

Electrical resistance tomography (ERT) is a method that calculates the subsurface distribution of electrical resistivity from a large number of resistance measurements made from electrodes. For in-situ applications, ERT uses electrodes on the ground surface or in boreholes. It is a relatively new imaging tool in geophysics. The basic concept was first described by Lytle and Dines as a marriage of traditional electrical probing (introduced by the Schlumberger brothers) and the new data inversion methods of tomography. Development of both the theory and practice of ERT was confined mostly to the late 1980s and the 1990s. Tomographic inversion added important new capabilities as it was more general, accurate, and rigorous at spatial imaging of geophysical electrical resistance data than earlier pseudosection or curve fitting methods.