Gravity inversion for sub-ice shelf bathymetry: strengths, limitations, and insights from synthetic modeling

Abstract. Sub-ice-shelf bathymetry strongly influences ice shelf stability by guiding melt-inducing water masses and through pinning points that resist the flow of the overriding ice. Collecting sub-ice-shelf bathymetry data using active source seismic surveying or direct observations is accurate but time-consuming and often impractical. Gravity methods provide a pragmatic, but more uncertain, alternative, by which observed variations in Earth's gravitational field are used to estimate the underlying bathymetry. We utilize a new open-source gravity inversion algorithm developed specifically for modeling sub-ice-shelf bathymetry and estimating the spatially variable uncertainty in the results. The inversion is tested on a suite of models created with high-resolution multibeam bathymetry data. These tests enable (1) determination of the best practices for conducting bathymetric inversions, (2) recognition of the limitations of the inversion and uncertainty quantification, and (3) identification of where community efforts should be focused for the future determination of Antarctica's sub-ice-shelf bathymetry. With an airborne gravity survey with 10 km spacing, 3 mGal of errors, a distribution of known bathymetry measurements, and a regional gravity field representative of the average Antarctic ice shelf, we achieve a root mean squared error of the inverted bathymetry of 23 m. We find that estimating and removing the regional component of gravity before the inversion is the largest source of error in the resulting bathymetry model, but this error can be greatly reduced with additional known bathymetry points. We analyzed Antarctic ice shelves and predict that, if high-resolution gravity data were available, gravity inversion could potentially improve bathymetry models for 95 % of them compared to interpolated products like Bedmap2.