Gravity inversion of basement relief of rift basin

What is it about?

The basement of a rift sedimentary basin, often possessing both smooth and nonsmooth shapes, is not easily recovered from gravity data by current inversion methods. We have developed a new 3D gravity inversion method to estimate the basement relief of a rift basin.

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Why is it important?

we have developed a 3D gravity inversion method to estimate the basement relief of a rift basin, which simultaneously consists of smooth and nonsmooth shape, while there are only 2D inversion methods presented in previous works. Our method differs from previous approaches in that we use the gravity anomaly, or simple inversions of it, to detect the discontinuous and continuous parts of the basement. The regularization inversion is required only once to recover the basement relief, requiring less a priori information and increasing efficiency. Moreover, when choosing to use conjugate gradient algorithm instead of Gauss-Newton methods, we avoid calculating Hessian matrix and its complications related to the total variation constraint function.

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