Geoid Anomalies and Fracture Zones in the Pacific Ocean

摘要

The high degree and order geoid field in the Pacific is a superposition of fracture zone anomalies and hot-spot swell anomalies. A two-dimensional spectral analysis of this field reveals a very strong north-south wavenumber contribution with a dominant wavelength of about 2000 km, a much smaller contribution from east-west wavenumbers, and negligible contributions from other directions. One dimensional profiles were taken in order to appreciate the magnitudes of the north-south and east-west components. A calculated geoid anomaly using an idealized fracture zone model contains just about the same amount of power in the 2350 km band wavelength as does the north-south profile of the SEASAT geoid field. In an attempt to correlate plate age with geoid anomalies, a digitized age map of the Pacific was used to generate a synthetic geoid, which was subtracted from SEASAT. This procedure produces a residual geoid in which the fracture zone anomalies appear to be diminished, if not removed.