Date of Award

2011-01-01

Degree Name

Master of Science

Department

Computational Science

Advisor(s)

Diane I. Doser

Abstract

The Border Ranges Fault System (BRFS) bounds the Cook Inlet and Susitna Basins, an important petroleum province within south-central Alaska. A primary goal in the research is to test several plausible models of structure along the Border Ranges Fault System using a novel three-dimensional inversion utilizing gravity and magnetic data, constrained with other geophysical, borehole and surface geological information. This research involves the development of inversion modeling software using a Borland C++ compiler as part of the Rapid Application Development (RAD) Studio. The novel inversion approach directly models known geology, and "a priori" uncertainties on the geologic model to allow researchers to compare alternative interpretations. This technique to evaluate three-dimensional structure in regions of extremely complex and poorly known geology can be applied in other studies of energy resources. The software reads an ASCII text file containing the latitude, longitude, elevation, and Free Air anomalies of each gravity station as well as known gridded surface files of known topography and subsurface units. The contributions of each node in the grid are computed in order to compare the theoretical gravity calculations from a forward model to the gravity observations. The computation of solutions to the linearized inversion yields a range of plausible densities. The user will have the option of varying the body proportions or densities to observe changes in gravity.

Language

en

Provenance

Received from ProQuest

File Size

71 pages

File Format

application/pdf

Rights Holder

Rolando Cardenas

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