It has been proved that the physical anisotropies of earth medium,
such as resistivity, electric susceptibility, velocity, and quality
factor, et al., exist and can’t be ignored. For this reason,
researches on anisotropy began tens of years ago and now become a
hotspot in the field of seismology and geo-electromagnetism in recent
years. Promoted by development of information sciences and technology,
especially driven by technological progresses of sensor, storage and
communication of big dataset, the observations of geophysical field
have been upgraded to 2- and 3-dimensional, multi-component vector
and tensor measurements at different elevations and spatial sizes,
such as 6-component seismic and 5-component MT acquisition provided
the possibilities of anisotropic inversion and more precise prediction
on physical parameters in geosciences. However, serious challenges
have been faced by the traditional geophysics, just because the theoretical
principles, methods and techniques of geophysics were built on the
basis of scalar observation, and massive vector data are observed
and their sharing and utilization become an incontrovertible trend.
Thus, in this No.567 Xiangshan-Science Conferences, the progresses
and problems in the study of anisotropic geophysics and vector field
were introduced and analyzed according to 4 sections. First, different
scale and types of vibrations from 6-component earthquake, 3-component
seismic exploration and micro-seismic monitoring, and the relations
in between are presented and discussed. Secondly, numerical simulations
and inversions of resistivity anisotropy are given more discussions;
especially on the non-uniqueness of anisotropic inversions for apparent
resistivity, tensor observation and azimuthal acquisition were also
addressed. Thirdly, the joint geophysical measurements from different
altitudes, including well logging, underground geophysical prospecting,
airborne and satellite geophysical observations are expected to be
used on land, in the ocean and in the air. Finally, instruments of
vector seismic sensing and tensor MT and CSAMT, processing techniques
of vector signals and software system, communication and storage of
big geophysical datasets, including advanced technologies on compressed
sensing, were introduced respectively. All these presentations could
not be covered in detail within one paper, though, the basic scientific
and technological problems about computational geophysics, active
or passive seismology, and anisotropic electromagnetism will be focused
on, while the detailed discussions on different geophysical fields
will follow in other papers, so that the issues on the fundaments
and generality of anisotropic geophysics could be studied extensively
in the future.