The inversion of apparent density based On the separation and continuation of potential field

Due to the restriction of memory and computing speed of computer,most existing techniques for 3D density inversion of the large-area gravity data are ineffective.This paper presents a rapid inversion method for 3D apparent density based on separation and continuation of potential field.The new method is carried out in the following three steps.Firstly,the gravity field on the plane is separated by a cutting method into several parts corresponding to strata of different depth.Secondly,by the way of downward continuation,the field resulted from different strata is respectively reduced to a plane corresponding to its depth.Finally,inversion is conducted to get the structure of apparent density of each stratum,namely,the approximate distribution of density.The method is called apparent density inversion.The inversion technique overcomes drawbacks of long computation and unstable solution,it takes less than 20 seconds to compute a density data set of 128 × 128 × 10 points on a PC of 1.99 GHz.The method is demonstrated on synthetic models and on real gravity data.