Gravity inversion by the MHODE method: Application to a salt dome case

We present a new method involving the inversion of the scaling function, a quantity that is calculated along the ridges in 3D space. The inversion is based on the Multi-HOmogeneity Depth Estimation (MHODE, Fedi et al., 2015) and enjoys the important feature of not being dependant on density, but only on the source geometry. In order to perform the inversion, it is necessary first to compute the scaling function directly from the data in 3D space along the ridges (Fedi et al., 2009; Florio and Fedi, 2014) and this step can be done by computing the field at different levels. We used 2D Talwani's formula as forward problem (Talwani et al., 1959). A set of non-linear equations is then formed, where the unknown quantities are the source coordinates. We used the Very Fast Simulated Annealing (VFSA) algorithm (Ingber, 1989; Sen and Stoffa, 2013) to solve such a system. We will show the application of our approach to the synthetic example of a salt dome like structure having an inhomogeneous density contrast and a real case of the Mors salt dome (Denmark).