Advisory
Geophysical consulting
Advice, review and independent opinion — separate from the survey work, and sometimes deliberately instead of it.
Collecting data is the easy half. The harder questions come before and after: whether geophysics can answer this at all, which method will, whether the scope you have been handed asks for the right thing, and whether the report on your desk actually supports the conclusion printed in it.
Those are judgment questions. Forty-five years of running surveys is what makes them answerable quickly, and we take them on as advisory work in their own right — whether or not anyone collects a single trace afterwards.
Where we are engaged
Independent review & QA/QC
You have a geophysical report and need to know whether to rely on it. We review the acquisition parameters, the coverage, the processing and the interpretation, and say plainly whether the conclusions are supported by the data — and what the report does not tell you.
Method selection & feasibility
Before anyone mobilizes: can geophysics answer this question on this ground, at this depth, with this much noise? Sometimes the honest answer is no, or not for the budget available. Better to hear it in a desk study than after a failed survey.
Scope & specification writing
Turning a vague requirement into a specification a contractor can price and a client can hold them to — methods, line spacing, quality levels, deliverable formats, acceptance criteria. Most disputes trace back to a scope that never said what it wanted.
Bid review & contractor selection
Three quotes that look interchangeable rarely are. We compare what is actually being offered — coverage, instrumentation, quality level, who interprets the data — and translate the differences into risk.
Expert witness & litigation support
Utility strikes, differing site conditions, damage claims, foundation and pavement failures. Report review, rebuttal, deposition and testimony, and plain-language explanation of what a geophysical method could and could not have found at the time.
Training & in-house briefings
For engineering and environmental firms that commission surveys regularly without anyone in house who reads the results critically. Half a day on what each method can deliver, what quality levels mean, and how to write a scope that gets it.
Would rather produce these documents yourself? Our sister company Terradocs generates standards-referenced proposals, scopes and safety documents, priced from your own rate table and carrying the limitations language that protects your firm.
Our position on conflict of interest
Advice is only worth having if the person giving it has nothing riding on the answer. So we publish the rule rather than leave you to ask:
We do not bid work we specified. Where GeoSearches writes the specification for a competitively tendered survey, or evaluates the bids, GeoSearches does not subsequently tender for that survey.
Independent review, expert witness work and training raise no such question — the data is already collected, or there is nothing to bid. For feasibility and method selection on privately appointed work, where no competitive procurement exists, we say in writing at the outset whether we would expect to carry out the resulting survey, and you decide from there.
If your procurement rules are stricter than ours, tell us and we will work to yours.
How it works
- Basis — hourly or day rate for review and advisory work; fixed fee for defined deliverables such as a specification or a feasibility study.
- Turnaround — a report review is usually a matter of days, not weeks.
- Remote — most of this work needs the data and the drawings, not a site visit. Location is rarely an obstacle.
- Confidentiality — NDAs signed as a matter of course, and expected where litigation is in prospect.
Talk it through first
Most of these engagements start with a conversation that establishes whether there is a job at all. That conversation is free, and occasionally it ends with us telling you that you do not need us.