Abstract
The satellite-derived gravity field over the South China Sea is used to obtain a model of crustal thickness variations and of the bathymetry. Constraining data are the crust-mantle interface depth values recovered from seismic studies and the shipborne bathymetry measurements. Essential for the modeling is furthermore the isostatic flexure model, which is numerically evaluated in terms of a convolutional approach, thus overcoming the problems connected to spectral analysis. The flexure model and the gravity model of crustal thickness variations agree very well over all of the basin, except for a near to linear trend present in the gravity data, that could be due to deeper lying sources. The crustal model allows to isolate the gravity contribution of the bathymetry from the total observed field, which can be used to improve the bathymetry. Both gravity anomaly and inverted bathymetry delineate the central basin rift very well, a structure not well recovered from the shiptrack bathymétrie sounding.
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Braitenberg, C., Pagot, E., Wang, Y., Fang, J. (2003). Bathymetry and Crustal Thickness Variations from Gravity Inversion and Flexural Isostasy. In: Hwang, C., Shum, C.K., Li, J. (eds) Satellite Altimetry for Geodesy, Geophysics and Oceanography. International Association of Geodesy Symposia, vol 126. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-18861-9_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-18861-9_17
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