Impact of compensating mass on the topographic mass — A study using isostatic and non-isostatic Earth crustal models

The Earth topographic masses are compensated by an isostatic adjustment. According to the isostatic hypothesis a mountain is compensated by mass deficiency beneath it, where the crust is floating on the viscous mantle. For study of the impact of the compensating mass on the topographic mass a crustal thickness (Moho boundary) model is needed. A new gravimetric-isostatic model to estimate the Moho depth, Vening Meinesz-Moritz model, and two well-known Moho models (CRUST2.0 and Airy-Heiskanen) are used in this study. All topographic masses cannot be compensated by simple isostatic assumption then other compensation mechanism should be considered. In fact small topographic masses can be supported by elasticity of the larger masses and deeper Earth’s layers. We discuss this issue applying spatial and spectral analyses in this study. Here we are going to investigate influence of the crustal thickness and its density in compensating the topographic potential. This study shows that the compensating potential is larger than the topographic potential in low-frequencies vs. in high-frequencies which are smaller. The study also illustrates that the Vening Meinesz-Moritz model compensates the topographic potential better than other models, which is more suitable for interpolation of the gravity field in comparison with two other models. In this study, two methods are presented to determine the percentage of the compensation of the topographic potential by the isostatic model. Numerical studies show that about 75% and 57% of the topographic potentials are compensated by the potential beneath it in Iran and Tibet. In addition, correlation analysis shows that there is linear relation between the topographic above the sea level and underlying topographic masses in the lowfrequencies in the crustal models. Our investigation shows that about 580±7.4 metre (in average) of the topographic heights are not compensated by variable the crustal root and density.