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

• Main Authors: Scheinert, Mirko, Ferracioli, Fausto, Schwabe, Joachim, Bell, Robin E., Studinger, Michael, Damaske, Detlef, Jokat, Wilfried, Aleshkova, Nadja, Jordan, Tom, Blankenship, Donald, Damiani, Theresa, Young, Duncan, Cochran, James R., Richter, Tom
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: 2016
• Subjects: Geophysics; Geodesy; Gravity > Measurement; Gravity anomalies; Antarctic; Antarc*; Antarctica
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-fykv-aq24

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.