The integrative density model of the crust and upper mantle of Eurasia: representation in GIS environment

Abstract

Modern geoinformation systems (GIS) are an indispensable instrument for efficient management of geographically referenced Earth sciences data. The Geophysical Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences (GC RAS) has a vast experience of development of web-oriented multidisciplinary GIS for geological and geophysical data representation and comprehensive analysis. One of the major segments of the geodatabase of GC RAS is geophysical and geological data on the solid Earth. This includes data on global gravity models, rheological parameters of the lithosphere, Moho depths, dynamic topography etc. As a case study for this paper an integrative density model of the crust and upper mantle of Eurasia was considered. It was compiled by the scientific team of the German Research Center for Geosciences (GFZ) using large sets of available seismic and gravity field data. This paper gives a detailed description of the model’s construction process. For representation of this model in GIS environment it was converted into a GIS-compatible series of the data layers. To facilitate the wide access to this data, they were published in the form of an online map-service.