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

• Published in: Geophysical Research Letters
• Main Authors: Scheinert, M., Ferraccioli, F., Schwabe, J., Bell, R., Studinger, M., Damaske, Detlef, Jokat, Wilfried, Aleshkova, N., Jordan, T., Leitchenkov, G., Blankenship, D., Damiani, T.M., Young, D., Cochran, J.R., Richter, T.D.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: Wiley 2016
• Subjects: Antarctic; Antarc*; Antarctica
• Online Access: https://epic.awi.de/id/eprint/39519/; https://hdl.handle.net/10013/epic.46868

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.