3D Gravity modeling by simulated annealing: applications to oil exploration and modeling of the chicxulub impact structure

In this work we introduce a 3D gravity inversion method based on simulated annealing. Gravity modeling can be an auxiliary tool for seismic methods in oil exploration of complex geologic media. In a first stage, the inversion algorithm is applied to synthetic data from three different test density distributions (a sphere, a dike and a fault plane). In a second stage, two study cases involving measured gravity data are also presented: conversion of a volume of seismic velocities into densities by gravity inversion, we briefly discuss some applications of this approach to subsalt imaging; and 3D gravity inversion of the gravity anomalies over the Chicxulub impact structure. Gravity inversions were constrained by using seismic, magnetic, and drilling information.