Author: Achmad Darul (Institut Teknologi Bandung), Dasapta Erwin Irawan (Institut Teknologi Bandung), and Eleonora Agustine (Universitas Padjadjaran)
This paper explores the hidden potential of geophysics for the environment, focusing on Indonesia. Geophysics plays a crucial role in understanding the Earth's physical characteristics and addressing environmental challenges. It is particularly relevant in water-related environmental problems, such as groundwater contamination and infiltration monitoring. Geophysics is also used to detect metals in fertile soils and plants, providing insights into agricultural practices and potential health risks. However, applying geophysics in urban areas poses challenges due to physical obstructions, cultural noise, limited workspace, permits, and safety concerns.
This article emphasizes the integration of geophysics with environmental studies, the need for further research on water-related environmental problems and metal detection, and the development of techniques tailored for urban environments. It suggests focusing on understanding the specific environmental challenges in Indonesia and leveraging advancements in technology for more accurate and efficient geophysical investigations.
In the Indonesian context, geophysics has diverse applications, including energy exploration, seismology, and oceanography. However, it has not been properly utilized in the field of environmental studies, particularly in urban areas.
Geophysics plays a crucial role in environmental studies by providing valuable insights into the Earth's physical characteristics and the living environment of mankind. Environmental geophysics, also known as near-surface geophysics, integrates environmental science and geophysics to study the relationship between geophysical fields and the Earth's physical characteristics, including natural and artificial environments (Sun et al., 2015). Geophysical techniques are pivotal tools for detecting and studying various environmental problems caused by drinking and wastewater, as well as delineating contaminated, partly affected, and virgin areas (Rehman et al., 2021).
These applications demonstrate the importance of geophysics in environmental studies, emphasizing its role in understanding environmental anomalies. The objective of this paper is to highlight the crucial role of geophysics in environmental studies and showcase its applications for addressing environmental problems in Indonesia. This will be based on a small bibliometric dataset from the Scopus database.
Geophysics has played a crucial role in addressing various water-related environmental challenges. For example, Hinnell et al. (2010) demonstrated the improved extraction of hydrologic information from geophysical data through coupled hydrogeophysical inversion, allowing for the monitoring of infiltration and redistribution of water using surface-based electrical conductivity surveys (Hinnell et al., 2010; Rehman et al., 2021) highlighted the integration of geophysical techniques with hydrological investigation for identifying groundwater contamination, emphasizing its frequent use in solving geological and environmental problems related to groundwater quality and exploration (Rehman et al., 2021). Additionally, Matias et al. (2004) showcased the successful application of geophysical methods in investigating aquifer contamination by various sources such as graveyards, highlighting the versatility of geophysics in addressing environmental problems related to groundwater pollution (Matias et al., 2004). These examples underscore the pivotal role of geophysics in understanding and mitigating water-related environmental issues, ranging from groundwater contamination to the study of aquifer pollution by diverse sources.
The application of geophysics in detecting metals from fertile soil and plants has been demonstrated in various studies, including those conducted in Indonesia by Bijaksana. For instance, Hamdan et al. (2023) utilized geophysical methods to investigate the accumulation of heavy metals in agricultural soil and products in the North China Plain, highlighting the relationship between the application of organic and phosphate fertilizers and the accumulation of cadmium, lead, copper, and zinc in the soil and agricultural products (Zheng et al., 2023). This study underscores the significance of geophysics in understanding the factors contributing to metal accumulation in agricultural areas.
Furthermore, this work has also shed light on the influence of soil heterogeneity on plant development and crop yield, as evaluated using time-series of UAV and ground-based geophysical imagery (Falco et al., 2021). This research emphasized the integration of multiscale and multitype soil and plant datasets to identify the spatiotemporal co-variance between soil properties and plant development and yield, showcasing the utility of geophysics in understanding the complex interactions between soil and plants.
Moreover, several studies have contributed to the widespread applications of geophysical methods for environmental problems. For example, Addisu and Bikila (2019) and da Silva et al. (2022) have investigated the resistance properties of different soil types to heavy metals, particularly in agricultural soils. Their research highlights the role of geophysics in assessing the impact of agricultural practices on soil properties and metal content. It provides valuable insights into the potential effects of long-term fertilization on the accumulation of heavy metals in soil, even in cemetery areas.
Additionally, Hamdan et al. (2023) have provided various examples of the diverse applications of geophysics. These examples include assessing heavy metal accumulation in agricultural soil, understanding soil-plant interactions, evaluating the impact of agricultural practices on metal content in soil and plants, and studying the hyper-accumulation of metal content by certain plants.
This section explains the applications of various geophysical methods in Indonesia. To gather scientific articles on this topic, we conducted a search using the Scopus database with the keywords "geophysics" AND "Indonesia". The search yielded 582 articles. To provide a visual representation of the corpus, we utilized Vosviewer and obtained the following result (see Figure 1).