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Acoustic monitoring of gas emissions from the seafloor. Part I: quantifying the volumetric flow of bubbles

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Abstract

Three decades of continuous ocean exploration have led us to identify subsurface fluid related processes as a key phenomenon in marine earth science research. The number of seep areas located on the seafloor has been constantly increasing with the use of multi-scale imagery techniques. Due to recent advances in transducer technology and computer processing, multibeam echosounders are now commonly used to detect submarine gas seeps escaping from the seafloor into the water column. A growing number of en-route surveys shows that sites of gas emissions escaping from the seafloor are much more numerous than previously thought. Estimating the temporal variability of the gas flow rate and volumes escaping from the seafloor has thus become a challenge of relevant interest which could be addressed by sea-floor continuous acoustic monitoring. Here, we investigate the feasibility of estimating the volumetric flow rates of gas emissions from horizontal backscattered acoustic signals. Different models based on the acoustic backscattering theory of bubbles are presented. The forward volume backscattering strength and the inversion volumetric flow rate solutions were validated with acoustic measurements from artificial gas flow rates generated in controlled sea-water tank experiments. A sensitivity analysis was carried out to investigate the behavior of the 120-kHz forward solution with respect to model input parameters (horizontal distance between transducer and bubble stream, bubble size distribution and ascent rate). The most sensitive parameter was found to be the distance of the bubble stream which can affect the volume backscattering strength by 20 dB within the horizontal range of 0–200 m. Results were used to derive the detection probability of a bubble stream for a given volume backscattering strength threshold according to different bubble flow rates and horizontal distance.

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Abbreviations

a :

Radius of bubble

n(a):

Concentration of bubbles per classes of radii

k :

Acoustic wave number

f 0 :

Resonance frequency of bubble

s v :

Volume backscattering coefficient (m−1)

S v :

Volume backscattering strength (dB re m−1)

σ bs :

Acoustic backscattering cross-section (m2)

TS :

Target strength (dB re 1 m2)

z :

Depth

v ascent :

Ascent rate of bubbles

F v :

Bubble volumetric flow

N t :

Number of bubbles of radius a per time unit

N m :

Number of bubbles per meter

N i :

Number of bubbles in the integrated volume

l i :

Integration bin width

V i :

Echo-integrated sampling volume

R :

Beam radius

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank the members of Testing Pool Facilities and Technological Research Unit of Ifremer for their help during experiments in water tank. The authors thank the members of Marine Geoscience Research Unit of Ifremer who also contributed to this work. The authors thank IRD/LEMAR acoustic team for their support during some experiments. Part of this paper reports postdoctoral work of I. Leblond funded by TOTAL.

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  1. Isabelle Leblond

    Present address: ENSTA Bretagne, 2 rue François Verny, 29806, Brest Cedex 9, France

Authors and Affiliations

  1. IFREMER, BP 70, 29280, Plouzané, France

    Isabelle Leblond, Carla Scalabrin & Laurent Berger

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  1. Isabelle Leblond
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  2. Carla Scalabrin
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Correspondence to Isabelle Leblond.

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Leblond, I., Scalabrin, C. & Berger, L. Acoustic monitoring of gas emissions from the seafloor. Part I: quantifying the volumetric flow of bubbles. Mar Geophys Res 35, 191–210 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11001-014-9223-y

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