THE EFFECT OF CRUSTAL MASSES ON GEOID ANOMALIES

Abstract

An important question in geosciences is the physical interpretation of global geoid forms and the improvement of our knowledge on the inner structure of the Earth. The authors suggest a new method which separates geoid heights due to upper known density inhomo- genities from geoid heights of inner unknown mass distributions. The interpretation of remain- ing geoid forms becomes presumably simpler after removing the effect of known masses from the full geoid. This paper deals with the mathematical solution of the effects of known sur- face mass distributions capable of computer computation and presents some results of initial numerical computations.