New Antarctic Gravity Anomaly Grid for Enhanced Geodetic and Geophysical Studies in Antarctica

Gravity surveying is challenging in Antarctica because of its hostile environment and inaccessibility. Nevertheless, many ground-based, airborne and shipborne gravity campaigns have been completed by the geophysical and geodetic communities since the 1980s. We present the first modern Antarctic-wide gravity data compilation derived from 13 million data points covering an area of 10 million km², which corresponds to 73% coverage of the continent. The remove-compute-restore technique was applied for gridding, which facilitated levelling of the different gravity datasets with respect to an Earth Gravity Model derived from satellite data alone. The resulting free-air and Bouguer gravity anomaly grids of 10 km resolution are publicly available. These grids will enable new high-resolution combined Earth Gravity Models to be derived and represent a major step forward towards solving the geodetic polar data gap problem. They provide a new tool to investigate continental-scale lithospheric structure and geological evolution of Antarctica.