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A multidisciplinary, statistical approach to study the relationships between helium leakage and neotectonic activity in a gas province: The Vasto basin, Abruzzo-Molise (central Italy)

¹ Department of Earth Sciences, University of Rome "La Sapienza," P. le A. Moro, 5-00185 Rome, Italy; giancarlo.ciotoli{at}uniroma1.it
² Department of Earth Sciences, University of Rome "La Sapienza," P. le A. Moro, 5-00185 Rome, Italy
³ Enterprise Oil Exploration, Via due Macelli, 00100 Rome, Italy
⁴ Department of Environment, ENEA/CRE-Casaccia, Via Anguillarese, 301-00060 Rome, Italy

Giancarlo Ciotoli has been associated with the Earth Science Department of Rome University since 1990. He has accumulated experience in air-photo interpretation, structural geology, and geochemistry. Recently, he has specialized in the application of statistical and geostatistical methods with geographic information systemsoftware for better interpreting spatially distributed geological data. He has been a professor of environmental geochemistry at Calabria University since 1998.Salvatore Lombardi is head of the Fluid Chemistry Laboratory in the Earth Sciences Department of Rome University. He was the founder of the soil-gas method in Italy and has spent the last 30 years researching many aspects of fluid chemistry in various geological environments to understand better subsurface processes that involve gas generation, migration, and accumulation. He is a member of the Italian Geological Society and the American Geophysical Union.

Sergio Morandi earned his degree in geology (first class honors) at "La Sapienza" University in Rome. He has 22 years of experience in oil and gas exploration and geophysics and seismic data acquisition and interpretation with Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi, Elf and Enterprise Oil as chief geophysicist. At present, he is the head of exploration in Shell Italia E&P SpA. Since 1997, he has been lecturer of applied seismology at Basilicata University and, since 2002, has been a board member of the Italian National Upstream Association.

Francesco Zarlenga earned his degree in geological science at "La Sapienza" University in Rome. He is a researcher at the National Agency for Energy and Environment in the field of environmental geology. He has published 85 papers on geology and environmental geology. He is president of the European Association for the Conservation of the Geological Heritage and a member of the Executive Committee of the Italian Society for Environmental Geology.

The evaluation of a new method based on the integration of geochemical, morphological, and structural analyses for the study of neotectonics in clay basins is presented. More than 900 helium soil-gas samples were collected over an area located in the central sector of the Adriatic foredeep (central Italy). Soil-gas distribution has been compared with the location and orientation of the main structural features described in the literature and/or characterized by field surveys and morphotectonic features obtained by air-photo interpretation and drainage network analysis. Collected data were statistically analyzed and compared by means of rose diagram plots. A geostatistical approach was used to describe the spatial behavior of the helium distribution. The comparison of the morphological and structural elements with the observed geochemical anomalies shows that the northwest-southeast is the most representative direction in agreement with the known Apennine structural trends. Moreover, the presence of north-south and east-west trends in the helium regional distribution, observed in the central and southern sectors of the studied area, is thought to be caused by a more recent deformation phase acting along these directions. This hypothesis is strengthened by the good correspondence, both at regional and local scales, between geochemical data and the results of the structural and geomorphological analyses. Furthermore, the magnitude and the anisotropic distribution of the helium anomalies in the residual maps indicate that at local scale, this gas could be related with the distribution of the hydrocarbon reservoirs occurring in the area.