Application of Geophysical

and Geostatistical Methods in

the Estimation of Clay Deposit
Reserve of Idofe and Environs,
Southwestern, Nigeria

*Mosuro G.O1, Bayewu O.O1

and Oloruntola M.O2

Summary
Geophysics and Geostatistics methods were
combined to quantify the clay deposit in Idofe,
Imope, Iganran, Aparaki and Falafanmu in
Southwestern Nigeria.
Vertical Electrical Sounding (VES) geophysical
method was used to investigate eighty (80)
different points on a 250m by 250m grid map.
This was aimed at determining the thickness of
the clay deposits. Schlumberger electrode array
was employed with electrode separation ranging
from 50 to 120m. The result was later subjected
to geostatistical analysis to estimate the overall
thickness of the clay deposit. Experimental
Department of Earth Sciences, Olabisi Onabanjo University,
Ago Iwoye, Nigeria
2
Department of Geosciences, University of Lagos, Lagos,
Nigeria
* Corresponding Author: motola_abdul@yahoo.com
1

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variogram with a fitted spherical model was

plotted. Model parameters were also determined.
These were used as input for clay deposit contour
map based on Kriging algorithm. The average
thickness of the deposit was determined from
the combination of the geophysical survey data
and estimate from the contour map.
Geophysical results revealed that clay is overlain
by top soil and a lateritic horizon. Beneath the
clay horizon is the bedrock. Apparent resistivity
ranges from 1.8-197.4 Ohm-m for the Clay horizon
with 0 -39.1m thickness. The Variogram model
revealed a range of influence of 342m and a nugget
effect of 3m2. These values were incorporated to
calculate the volume of the deposit which was
estimated to be 35,062,528.03m3
Keywords- Clay, VES, Variogram, Kriging

41

Introduction
Clay is one of the most useful industrial mineral
that has found its way into the industries as refractory
materials, in the manufacturing of fine porcelains,
papers, ceramics, pottery, as filler for pigment, in
landfill as impermeable base, as drilling mud and
a better alternative for cement brick which is an
important component in construction. The occurrence
and importance of clay have been recognized since
ancient times, when it has been used for primitive
applications like pottery, construction of mud houses,
bricks, etc. It is traditionally used either in the raw
state or at best made into simple sun dried bricks
for construction of houses (Oloruntola et. al, 2010).
Clay deposits are found as either residual in basement
complex or transported in sedimentary basins. In

Nigeria, residual clay deposits have been found in

locations such as OmiAdio, IkereEkiti, Jos, Barkin
Ladi, Ubuluku, Falafanmu and Imope (Adediran et. al.,
1989; Adepelumi and Olorunfemi, 2000; Olowolafe,
1991, Oloruntola et. al, 2010). Oloruntola et. al,
(2010) evaluated the physical, refractoriness and
firing properties of Falafanmu, Igaran, Idofe and Oke
Oko clay and in order to determine their industrial
suitability. The clay in the areas was found to be
suitable for ceramic production, firebricks production
and blast furnace for metals with melting point of less
than 15000C. In spite of the recognized suitability
of the clay in this area for different utilities, the
information about the reserve is largely unknown.
This study is therefore aimed at quantifying the clay
deposit found in Idofe and environs.
The resource quantification involved the use of

Fig. 1: Map of the Study Area showing the 70 square grids and 80 VES points (Mosuro et. al., 2009).

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Vertical Electrical Sounding (VES) to determine the

clay thickness at several points and geostatistical
kriging for the reserve/ resource estimation.
VES is a classical method of applied geophysics used
for distant and nondestructive study of geological
medium. It uses direct current (DC) injected in
the ground surface to investigate the underground
electrical resistivity (Vladimir et. al., 2006), VES

involves measurement of apparent resistivity

of subsurface materials as a function of depth or
position. The resistivity measured is a complex
function of porosity, permeability, ionic content of
the pore fluids and clay mineralization (Afolabi et
al, 2004). Electrical resistivity measurements have
been successfully used in the delineation of aquifer
zone for groundwater exploitation, engineering site

Fig. 2: Geological Map of the Study Area

Fig. 3: Typical Electrical Sounding curve of resistivity against electrode distance

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Table 1: Clay Resistivity and Thickness obtained from the VES

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Fig. 4: The Geoelectric Section along Ig18, Ig19, Ig20,Ig 21, (Vertical Exaggeration x5)

Fig. 5: Omni-directional experimental with Spherical Model

Fig. 6: Isopach Map of the Clay with thickness values at the VES points.
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45

investigation for structures, environmental studies,

agriculture for evaluation of stone contents, detection
of 3-D bodies of (mineral deposits) anomalous
electrical conductivity (Keary et. al. 2002).
The major role of a geologist during a mineral
exploration programme according to Kokesz (2006) is
the estimation of geological parameters such as grades,
thicknesses, accumulations, and quality parameters;
the mineral resources/reserves calculation, and
the evaluation of the accuracy of their estimation.
Geostatistical method has been found very useful in
addressing these tasks. The geostatistical estimation
technique which may fulfill all the required criteria is
called Kriging. This technique has been named after
a mining engineer D.G. Krige who first applied it
in 1951 in the mining field to estimate the average
grade and total tonnage of ore reserve of some South
African mines. Matheron from Centre de Morphologie
Mathematique de Fontainebleau in France, formalised
this method and made a second generalisation in
1973(Fatima-Zohra, 2006).

Location of the Study Area

The study area is located within longitude and
latitude 3056.6 and 30 59 and 70 53.7and 70 55.2
respectively (Fig.1). It comprises the villages of Idofe,
Iganran, Imope, Falafanmu and part of Aparaki,
Southwestern Nigeria. The area extent is about 30
square kilometers.

Geology of the Study Area

There are few outcrops of rocks in the study area.
Outcrops were observed along Idofe- Falafanmu road,
Iganran and Imope. The main rock types are biotitegneiss, large pegmatite body and migmatised-gneiss.
A geological map of the study area is shown in Fig.
2. The gneiss is of granitic origin and of the same
composition with granite but is distinguished from it
by the foliation (Hamblin and Howard, 2005).
Migmatised-gneiss is usually granitic in composition
and varies in texture from aplitic to granitic to
pegmatitic. But unlike the semi-continuous foliations
in granite-gneiss, foliations here are highly contorted
(Hamblin and Howard, 2005).

Methodology
A. Electrical Resistivity Geophysical Method
Resistivity method is a technique by which artificially
generated electric currents are introduced into the

46

ground and the resulting potential differences are

measured at the surface. Deviation from the pattern of
potential differences expected from the homogeneous
ground provides information on the form and electrical
properties of subsurface inhomogeneities (Kearey et.
al., 2002). Properties that affect the resistivity of soil
or rock include porosity, water content, composition
(clay mineral and metal content),salinity of the pore
water, and grain size distribution (Robert,1995).
ABEM SAS 300 resistivity meter mounted on 12
volts dry cell rechargeable power source that supplies
power in the form of electrical current was used. The
instrument is a signal averaging system that measures
resistance in ohms. A handheld GPS receiver was
used to locate the position of each grid on the ground
surface. VES survey was done by employing the
Schlumberger electrode array with a maximum current
electrode (AB/2) varied from 50m to 120m depending
on the measured depth to the basement. Fig. 1 refers
to the location map with VES points.
Data interpretation was done by multiplying the
resistance readings with the corresponding geometric
factor. Resistivity values, product of resistance and
geometric factor, were plotted against the electrode
separation on a log-log graph. Curve matching
(Orellona and Mooney, 1966) was used to obtain
the geoelectric layers resistivity and thickness while
WINRESIST software was used with input from the
curve matched result for the computer iteration.
B. Geostastistical Method
Geostatistical estimation technique deals with
regionalized variables, that is, data for which each value
is associated with a location in space. It is assumed
that there is some connection between location and
data value. From known values at sampled points,
geostatistical analysis can be used to predict spatial
distributions of properties over large areas or volumes
(Knudsen, et. al. (1978); Raymond (1979); Englund
(1990); Clark (1979); Isaaks and Srivastava(1989).
The data about the variability structure of considered
variables are taken into account through variograms
which are used to quantify spatial correlations between
observations. Kriging provides a measurement of the
accuracy of the estimates in the form of a kriging
variance. This is one of the advantages of geostatistics
over traditional methods of resources/reserves
assessment (Kokesz, 2006). The technique and theory
of geostatistics has grown into a field dedicated to
finding the Best Linear Unbiased Estimator (BLUE)
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of the unknown characteristics being studied. At the

heart of kriging is the semivariogram or structure
function of the regionalized variables that are being
estimated. This amounts to prior information that
must be supplied to the software before contouring.
This information is usually presented in the form of
the variogram, in which the semivariance is a function
of distance or lag (h).
Variogram is defined as the half of the mean squared
difference between data pairs separated by the vector
h.

. Eqn1
Z(x) is sample value at point x.
Z(x+h) is sample value at point x+h.
N (h) is total number of data pairs.
Variogram models are fit into experimental
variogram calculated to give the value of parameters
such as Nugget (C0), Sill (C+C0) and Range (a).
Spherical Model is widely applicable in practice. The
general equation is

Eqn.2

Results and Discussion

The result obtained from the VES survey is presented
in the Table 1. Fig. 3 is a typical VES curve of resistivity
(ohm-m) against electrode separation (m).
Loke, (2000) described lithologies with resistivity
values between 1-100ohm-m as clay. Horizons with
such resistivity values were inferred as Clay while
those with resistivity values slightly above 100 ohm-m
found above the basements were inferred as being
slightly sandy but with predominant clay. Fig. 4 shows
the geoelectric section of some sample points located
250m apart. VES Stations Id6, Ap6, Ap10, Ap12,
Ap15, Ap16, Ig1, Ig2, Ig11 and Im1, showed that
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fresh basement rock underlain the top soil and are of

shallow depth. No values were therefore recorded for
Clay at these stations. Fig. 5 is the Omni-directional
experimental variogram plotted for the clay thickness
with a fitted spherical model. The model parameters
such as the Sill or Variance, Nugget effect, range of
influence and anisotropy were determined. The range
of influence is the distance at which samples become
independent of one another. From the directional
variogram, it equals 342m. This implies that value
measured at any point has influence up to 342m in all
directions. Nugget effect is a constant that accounts
for the influence of high concentration centers in the
data that prevent the experimental omnidirectional
semivariogram from passing through the origin. It
can also imply error in sampling or measurements.
The nugget value 3m2 is relatively low for the clay,
and it could be seen in Table 1 that the only high
concentrations of the clay deposit is found at Im5,
with a value of 39.1m. This indicates that there is
mixture of points with high and low values, that is,
the values are random, and they do not follow any
particular pattern.
The sill is the equivalent of classical statistics
variance (square of standard deviation) that is the
value of variogram () at which the graph levels off. It
equals 43m2 for the clay deposit. These values were
used as input for the Kriging based contour map, Fig.
6, using Golden software surfer 8.
The mean of the values of the contour line and that
of the VES was used to determine the average clay
thickness in each of the 70 square grids. The clay
volume (m3) on the other hand was estimated as the
product of the clay thickness (m) and the area (m2)
extent (Table 3). The overall results revealed a Clay
estimate of 35,062,528.03m3.

Conclusion
Two applied geologic methods have been combined
to quantify the clay deposit in Idofe, and its surrounding
villages. VES determined the clay resistivity and
thickness at 80 points. The geostatistical method
estimated the volume of clay to be 35,062,528.03m3.
The two methods have proven to be efficient and cost
effective especially when the reserve volume is needed
to take serious decision at either the reconnaissance
or semi-detailed exploration stage. However, since
the interpretation of geophysical data is subjected
to many factors, logging through drilling could be

47

employed at some VES stations. The true thickness

obtained could be used to re-interpret or remodel the
VES data (Kumar et. al, 2007). This would provide
more accurate and reliable estimation.

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