Articles

New Antarctic gravity anomaly grid for enhanced geodetic and geophysical studies in Antarctica

Scheinert, Mirko; Ferracioli, Fausto; Schwabe, Joachim; Bell, Robin E.; Studinger, Michael; Damaske, Detlef; Jokat, Wilfried; Aleshkova, Nadja; Jordan, Tom; Leitchenkov, G.; Blankenship, Donald; Damiani, Theresa; Young, Duncan; Cochran, James R.; Richter, Tom

Gravity surveying is challenging in Antarctica because of its hostile environment and inaccessibility. Nevertheless, many ground-based, airborne, and shipborne gravity campaigns have been completed by the geophysical and geodetic communities since the 1980s. We present the first modern Antarctic-wide gravity data compilation derived from 13 million data points covering an area of 10 million km2, which corresponds to 73% coverage of the continent. The remove-compute-restore technique was applied for gridding, which facilitated leveling of the different gravity data sets with respect to an Earth gravity model derived from satellite data alone. The resulting free-air and Bouguer gravity anomaly grids of 10 km resolution are publicly available. These grids will enable new high-resolution combined Earth gravity models to be derived and represent a major step forward toward solving the geodetic polar data gap problem. They provide a new tool to investigate continental-scale lithospheric structure and geological evolution of Antarctica.

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Also Published In

Title
Geophysical Research Letters
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1002/2015GL067439

More About This Work

Academic Units
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
Marine Geology and Geophysics
Published Here
July 1, 2019

Notes

The supporting information document is appended to the end of the text.