Isostatic Implications of Different Seismic and Gravity Derived Moho Depths for Antarctica

Several studies with different methods have been performed to investigate the lithospheric structure of Antarctica, in particular the Moho as the crust-mantle boundary. Yet, seismological surveys are regionally limited or suffer from sparse station coverage due to the remoteness and size of the continent. On the other hand, gravity studies are inherently ambiguous and therefore not able to determine both the geometry and the density contrast of the Moho. Existing Moho depth models for Antarctica show large discrepancies, even among different seismological methods, but all the more between seismological and gravity models. As a first step towards a possible reconcilement, we perform non-linear gravity inversions with simultaneous consideration of seismological data. Depending on the seismological input data, different depths and density contrasts yield the best fit. The results, however, are not in line with the pure seismological models. Subsequently, we compute simple Airy-isostatic Moho depth models and evaluate these together with multiple Moho models from previous studies in terms of their gravitational signal, applying different values for the density contrast. The models' responses are checked against observational data: vertical gravity at 50 km altitude from the spherical harmonics expansion model GOCO05s, and the gravity gradient tensor at 225 km altitude from the GOCE gravity gradient grids. While the gravity responses from the seismological models show strong disagreements with the data, the Airy-isostatic models fit better. Yet, differences of up to 10 km in depth exist between the isostatic and the gravity-inverted Moho models. From these differences in vertical gravity, in the gravity gradients and in Moho depth, we identify regions where a simple density contrast is not sufficient to explain the observed gravitational field. We conclude that lateral and vertical density variations must be considered, which might originate from high-density lower crust or different lithospheric mantle densities due to composition (age) and temperature. In consequence, comprehensive lithospheric modelling is required to explain both the seismic and the gravity for Antarctica.