Isterre Laboratory (Grenoble, France) and GFZ (Potsdam, Germany) joined their efforts to monitor gases while drilling in real-time within the frame of the DIVE ICDP project. Two boreholes of nearly one kilometer deep have been drilled in the Ivrea-Verbano Zone (Italy) to probe the deep continental crust and its transition to the mantle. The miniRUEDI, together with other gas analyzers, was deployed successfully all along the course of the drilling operations (working non stop two times four months in a row). Hugo Dutoit (PhD candidate at University Grenoble Alpes) was in charge of the monitoring. The obtained data reveal that that migration of deep fracture fluids can be tracked via mud gas logging.

Laurent Truche, Hugo Dutoit, Thomas Wiersberg, and their colleagues