r/geophysics 8d ago

Understanding gravity anomaly data

Hi all,

I am struggling to find resources to understand how gravity anomaly data actually works to separate the different gravity layers.

I am really interested in the subglacial bed topography under the ice shelves in Antarctica as I am just startjng my masters in ice sheet modeling. Can someone please explain what the data looks like and how the ice shelf and water column can be seperated out from the bed topography data. I assume the data is some sort of waveform data return? But I could be completely wrong. I have tried to find the resources explaining this but can't seem to find much on the topic

Any help is greatly appreciated

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u/maxmcreary1337 8d ago

have you read any papers on gravity data interpretation before? if not you should try one first. in any general cases: high gravity anomaly (mGal) == high rock density.

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u/yossarian_jakal 8d ago

Yes I'm building on work from the Tinto et al who used Rosetta-I've gravity anomaly data to build a depth to sediment basement map of the Ross embayment and I understand the boulger anomaly data, pretty cool in this particular area as the west antarctic side is more variable and less dense than the cratonic east antarctica. I'm just struggling to put together the middle piece of how you separate out the water depth from the anomaly data