A correspondence of altimetric gravity texture to abyssal hill morphology along the flanks of the Southeast Indian Ridge

Abstract

[1] We examine the relationship between altimetric gravity and abyssal hill textures along the flanks of Southeast Indian Ridge, where previous studies observed a progressive west-to-east increase in abyssal hill roughness and scales. Such a relationship is often considered unlikely because abyssal hills are typically smaller than upward continuation filter scales. However, our results, which exclude ridges, fracture zones and large pseudofaults, show that altimetric gravity roughness and characteristic scales in this region also increase from west to east and, at the largest scales, gravity texture exhibits ridge-parallel lineaments. Synthetic profiles also demonstrate how the texture parameters of a filtered field are related to those of the unfiltered field, particularly where the characteristic scale of the latter is smaller than the filter length.