Moho Inversion by Gravity Anomalies in the South China Sea: Updates and
Improved Iteration of the Parker-Oldenburg Algorithm.
Abstract
The Moho is the interface between crust and mantle, and accurate
location of the Moho is important for both resource exploration and deep
earth condition and structural change investigations. The
Parker-Oldenburg (P-O) method, is simple and efficient and thus has been
extensively applied in the frequency domain and for Moho depth
inversion. However, Moho fluctuation simulations using the P-O method
are not reliable because of the lack of field geographic data
constraints during the inversion process and excessively smoothing of
data details caused by using a filter to correct the source data
signals. To solve those problems, we propose an improved iteration P-O
method with variable density, the iterative process is constrained by
geological data in the inversion parameters, and the variable depth of
the gravity interface is iterated using an equivalent form of upward
continuation in the Fourier domain, which is more stable and convergent
than downward continuation term in original P-O method. Synthetic
experiments indicate that improved method has the better consistency
among the simulations than original method, and our improved method has
the smallest RMS of 0.59 km. In a real case, we employed the improved
method to invert the Moho depth of the South China Sea, and the RMS
between our Moho model and the seismological data is the smallest value
of 3.87 km. The synthetic experiments and application of the model to
the SCS further prove that our method is practical and efficient.