440 Geophysics: Gravity anomalies due to buried bodies

Thorsten Becker, University of Southern California, 03/2005

Sphere
I here discuss a few gravity anomaly formulas without derivation because they are quite instructive.
As derived in class, the gravity anomaly in z direction, gz , due to a buried sphere of radius b with
density anomaly is given by (the excess mass is simply 4/3b3 ):
gSz =

4
b3 h
G
3 .
3
(x2 + h2 ) 2

(1)

Here, x is the horizontal distance at the surface measured from the center of the anomaly, and h
is the burial depth, i.e. the vertical distance between the surface and the center of the mass. You
can see that there is a clear trade-off between and b: a maximum gravity anomaly of certain
amplitude can be generated by a large, only somewhat denser object, or a smaller but very dense
object. However, the shape of the anomaly will be different for these two cases. This is easier to
see if we rewrite eq. (1):
g Sz =

gS 4
gSz
= z =
Gb gz
3

 2 
 3 4

3
b
2
1 + (x/h)2
= b 2 1 + x2 2 .
h
3

(2)

While we have just performed a few simple algebraic operations (like pulling out h3 from
the denominator of the right hand side of eq. (1)), it is now much easier to see whats going
on. The gravity anomaly has been normalized by what we picked as a typical or characteristic
value for this problem, gz = Gb. gz has units of m/s2 , making eq. (2) non-dimensional, i.e.
[g Sz = gSz /gz ] = 1 where [] denotes units of.
The first term on the right hand side of eq. (2) is telling us about the effect of the size of the
anomaly, b, normalized by burial depth, h, call this parameter b = b/h. The deeper the anomaly for
constant b, the smaller b 2 and hence gCz . The second term on the right hand side shows the shape
dependence of the anomaly as a function of horizontal distance, x, from the center of the anomaly.
In this part of the equation, x is again normalized as x = x/h by h, the characteristic length scale
for this problem. The shape of the anomaly is therefore only dependent on x,
a deeper anomaly
will have a wider spatial signal, and vice versa.

Infinite cylinder
An infinitely long cylinder stretched out into the plane (in approximation, you may want to think
of a tunnel, for instance) has an anomaly of
gCz = 2G

b2 h
,
x 2 + h2

(3)

sphere, b = 1.0
sphere, b = 0.5
inf. cylinder, b = 1.0
inf. cylinder, b = 0.5
semi-inf. slab

0.9
0.8
0.7
g / (G b)

Figure 1: Comparison of
normalized g z profiles
across buried anomalies
for a sphere (eq. (2)), a
cylinder (eq. (4)), and
a
semi-infinite
sheet
(eq. (6)) as a function of x
g z has been
and b0 = b.
divided by the maximum
amplitudes of 4/3, 2, and
4, respectively.

0.6
0.5
0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1
0
-10

-5
0
5
distance from source center / burial depth

10

where the variables are defined similarly to the spherical case and h is burial depth. Again, we can
rewrite eq. (3) by dividing by gz and normalize all lengths by h for a general analysis so that

1
g Cz = 2b 1 + x2
.

(4)

Eq. (4) for the cylinder is similar to that for the sphere, eq. (2), but the decrease of the anomaly
with burial depth (or increase with anomaly size) is now only b and not b 2 . Furthermore, the
shape of the anomaly is less focused; both these effects are due to the different geometry where
the mass distributed along the cylinder contributes strongly.

Semi-infinite sheet
Our last is example is a semi-infinite sheet of thickness t extending to infinity with positive x. Its
anomaly is
 

1 x
B
+ tan
.
(5)
gz = 2Gt
2
h
Here, h is again burial depth and with t = 2b. From eq. (5), we can see that for large distances
above the sheet anomaly tan1 (x ) /2, and therefore gBz (x ) = 2Gt, which is
4gz and identical to the Bouguer correction with t being the height above the reference ellipsoid.
The normalized version of eq. (5) is

4 
1

B
gz =
+ tan (x)
.
2

(6)

Eqs. (2), (4), and (6) are compared in Figure 1 where the anomalies have been normalized by their
maximum values at x = 0 or x , respectively.