Mediterranean Sea Crustal Structure from Potential Fields, Results of XORN Project

The Mediterranean Sea crust has been intensely studied both for scientific reasons and for economic activities such as natural resources exploration and exploitation. However, a complete high-resolution numerical model of the crust over the whole region is still missing. In fact, from the one hand, we have global crustal models, which however are usually too coarse to accurately describe this complex area, while on the other hand we have continental scale models, which are obtained by merging different datasets, without an homogeneous analysis.

In the current study we perform a joint inversion of gravity and magnetic field measurements, constrained with seismic profiles, on the whole Mediterranean Sea Area with a spatial resolution of about 15 km in the planar direction and ranging from 200 m to 1200 m in the vertical one, for a total of more than 2-million cells.

The inversion has been carried out within the XORN project (https://xorn-project.eu/) funded by the European Space Agency. The result of the study is a complete three-dimensional (3D) model of the crust beneath the Mediterranean Sea region in terms of density and magnetic susceptibility distributions and geological horizons, completed by an estimate of the predicted accuracy.

Several maps, such as depth of main geological horizons (namely the base of Plio-Quaternary and Messinian sediments, the basement, the Curie isotherm, and the Moho), have been derived, from the 3D model.

The model has been validated through comparisons with local studies, seismic information, heat flow data not used within the inversion.