Gravity effect of Alpine slab segments based on geophysical and petrological modelling

Lowe, Maximilian; Ebbing, Jörg; El-Sharkawy, Amr; Meier, Thomas

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/se-12-691-2021

Articles | Volume 12, issue 3

https://doi.org/10.5194/se-12-691-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Special issue:

New insights into the tectonic evolution of the Alps and the...

https://doi.org/10.5194/se-12-691-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 12, issue 3

Research article

|

19 Mar 2021

Research article |

| 19 Mar 2021

Gravity effect of Alpine slab segments based on geophysical and petrological modelling

Maximilian Lowe, Jörg Ebbing, Amr El-Sharkawy, and Thomas Meier

Data sets

ETOP01 1 arc-minute global reliefmodel: Procedures, data sources and analysis C. Amante and B. W. Eakins https://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/global/

The combined global gravity field model XGM2019e P. Zingerle, R. Pail, T. Gruber, and X. Oikonomidou http://icgem.gfz-potsdam.de/tom_longtime

The Slab Puzzle of the Alpine-Mediterranean Region: Insights from a new, High-Resolution, Shear-Wave Velocity Model of the Upper Mantle A. El-Sharkawy, T. Meier, S. Lebedev, J. Behrmann, M. Hamada, L. Cristiano, C. Weidle, and D. Köhn https://ds.iris.edu/ds/products/emc-mere2020/

The Moho depth map of the European Plate M. Grad, T. Tiira, and ESCWorking Group https://www.seismo.helsinki.fi/mohomap/

Satellite gravity gradient grids for geophysics J. Bouman, J. Ebbing, M. Fuchs, J. Sebera, V. Lieb, W. Szwillus, R. Haagmans, and P. Novak https://earth.esa.int/eogateway/catalog/goce-global-gravity-field-models-and-grids

Model code and software

tesseroids: Forwardmodeling gravitational fields in spherical coordinates L. Uieda, V. C. Barbosa, and C. Braitenberg https://tesseroids.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

LitMod3D: An interactive 3-D software to model the thermal, compositional, density, seismological, and rheological structure of the lithosphere and sublithospheric upper mantle J. Fullea, J. C. Afonso, J. A. D. Connolly, M. Fernandez, D. García-Castellanos, and H. Zeyen https://github.com/javfurchu/litmod

The GMT/MATLAB Toolbox P. Wessel and J. F. Luis https://github.com/GenericMappingTools/gmt/releases/tag/5.4.5

Short summary

This study estimates the gravitational contribution from subcrustal density heterogeneities interpreted as subducting lithosphere beneath the Alps to the gravity field. We showed that those heterogeneities contribute up to 40 mGal of gravitational signal. Such density variations are often not accounted for in Alpine lithospheric models. We demonstrate that future studies should account for subcrustal density variations to provide a meaningful representation of the complex geodynamic Alpine area.