Abstract:Summary
Hydrocarbon fields that are located offshore Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (UAE), are known to be associated with undulating thick sedimentary sequences. These undulations are mostly influenced by variations in the depth of Infracambrian Hormuz salts that generate negative gravity anomalies. Nonetheless, a few known oil fields are uncorrelated with the airborne gravity observations. This is attributed to the interference from large positive gravity anomalies from basement highs. To fil… Show more
“…We developed a more accurate model by considering the crust as a finite slab and modeled the gravity effect of volumetric dilatation within a rectangular prism with equal upper face sides (Sc). Plouff's relationship 65 is used to calculate the gravity effect at the center of the upper face of the prism [66][67][68][69] :…”
Changes in the density of the shallow crust has been previously related to co-seismic strain release during earthquakes, however, the influence of inter-seismic deformation on crustal density variations is poorly understood. Here we present gravity observations from the iGrav superconducting gravimeter in southern Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada which reveal a substantial gravity increase between July 2012 and April 2015. We identify a negative correlation between this gravity increase and crustal dilatation strain derived from horizontal GPS velocities. The overall increasing gravity trend is caused by the gravity increase during and immediately before and after episodic tremor and slip events, which is partially compensated by gravity decrease occurring between the events. We conclude that the observed gravity increase results from a density increase due to crustal compression and that this is mostly a result of inter-seismic strain accumulation during the subduction of the Juan de Fuca plate beneath the North American plate.
“…We developed a more accurate model by considering the crust as a finite slab and modeled the gravity effect of volumetric dilatation within a rectangular prism with equal upper face sides (Sc). Plouff's relationship 65 is used to calculate the gravity effect at the center of the upper face of the prism [66][67][68][69] :…”
Changes in the density of the shallow crust has been previously related to co-seismic strain release during earthquakes, however, the influence of inter-seismic deformation on crustal density variations is poorly understood. Here we present gravity observations from the iGrav superconducting gravimeter in southern Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada which reveal a substantial gravity increase between July 2012 and April 2015. We identify a negative correlation between this gravity increase and crustal dilatation strain derived from horizontal GPS velocities. The overall increasing gravity trend is caused by the gravity increase during and immediately before and after episodic tremor and slip events, which is partially compensated by gravity decrease occurring between the events. We conclude that the observed gravity increase results from a density increase due to crustal compression and that this is mostly a result of inter-seismic strain accumulation during the subduction of the Juan de Fuca plate beneath the North American plate.
“…The density of the sediment is assumed to be the reference value of 2.6 g cm −3 and the density contrast is assumed to be zero. We compute susceptibility for the basement based on its density contrast by assuming a constant ratio of Δρ χ = 50 [39,40]. The prior for the number of nodes is uniform between 6 and 50.…”
Typical geophysical inverse problems are ill-posed and non-unique which causes challenges for interpretation. To address these issues, deterministic inversion methods often apply constraints to parameter values, which control the effective number of parameters. However, such approaches can inhibit inference on complex structural boundaries. Bayesian trans-dimensional (trans-D) parametrizations for Earth structure partition space based on data information with the ability to adapt the parametrization locally to data information. Therefore, trans-D approaches can avoid under- or over-parametrizing regions of the model. Nonetheless, these parametrizations depend on the choice of partitioning types, such as Voronoi nodes or wavelet decomposition. In addition, trade-offs exist between spatial resolution and correlated data errors. We present a hierarchical model that treats both spatial and data noise parametrizations as trans-D to better incorporate trade-offs between noise and structure into uncertainty quantification. This includes a hierarchical spatial partitioning based on linear and nearest-neighbor interpolations and alpha shapes. The alpha shapes provide advantages for the inversion of potential field data by permitting flexibility in the shapes of structures of interest. The trans-D autoregressive noise model quantifies the impact of correlated noise on geophysical parameter estimates. We compare these methods with nested Voronoi partitioning and show differences in uncertainties, data fit, and parsimony of the parametrizations. Studies on simulated data show well-resolved structures and successful decorrelation of data residuals while requiring few parameters. The inversion of field data infers basement and salt broadly consistent with previous studies, but results show additional details that are consistent with independent geological knowledge.
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