Negative gravity anomaly over spreading rift valleys: Mid-Atlantic Ridge at 26°N

Abstract

A pronounced negative free-air gravity anomaly commonly occurs over the median valley of slow spreading ocean ridges. Previous results, using Wiener filtering and cross-spectral analysis techniques for the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, obtained estimates of the elastic plate thickness in the range of 7–13 km and the existence of a residual negative gravity anomaly over the median rift valley, suggesting that the rift valley has a response function different than the remainder of the spreading ridge. In this paper we have improved the derivation of the topography-gravity admittance function for spreading ocean crust by carefully avoiding several sources of spectral splattering when processing the data: (1) selecting data from a cruise that followed a flowline of central North Atlantic relative plate motion and hence is least corrupted by fracture zones; and (2) accounting for the difference in distance between the gravity meter and the regional variation in elevation as the ridge crest is traversed. Improvements of lesser importance include the use of cubic splines to interpolate to equally spaced data rather than linear interpolation, and correction of the free-air anomaly values for long-wavelength variations of the indirect effect. Comparison of the resulting admittance function to elastic flexure response functions suggests an elastic plate thickness of about 8 km. The improved admittance function, when convolved with the ridge topography, provides a predicted gravity profile that accounts very well for the negative anomaly over the rift valley. Therefore, the isostatic response function for the rift valley is similar to that for the topography away from the rift valley.