Isostasy and Flexure of the Lithosphere

By Anthony B. Watts. 2001

1,080 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Isostasy is a simple concept, yet it has long perplexed students of geology and geophysics. This fully updated edition provides the tools to better understand this concept using a simplified mathematical treatment, numerous geological examples, and an extensive bibliography. It starts by tracing the ideas behind local and regional models of isostasy before describing the theoretical background, the observational evidence. It now also includes an exploration of the role of flexure in landscape evolution and dynamic topography and discussions of lithosphere memory, inheritance, and new NASA mission topography and gravity data. The book concludes with a discussion of flexure's role in understanding the evolution of the surface features of the Earth and its neighboring planets. Intended for advanced undergraduate and graduate students of geology and geophysics, it will also be of interest to researchers in gravity, geodesy, sedimentary basin formation, mountain building and planetary geology.

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Citations in the corpus

Computations of the viscoelastic response of a 3-D compressible Earth to surface loading: an application to Glacial Isostatic Adjustment in Antarctica and Canada (2012, methodology): “Shepherd et al. (2012) use two newly developed GIA models, W12a (Whitehouse et al. 2012) and IJ05_R2 (Ivins et al. 2013), to compute GIA corrections for GRACE Antarctic mass loss estimates.”
Integrated geophysical‐petrological modeling of the lithosphere and sublithospheric upper mantle: Methodology and applications (2008, background): “[33] Local isostasy has been proven to be a suitable approximation in regions where short-wavelength, elastically supported features such as buried and/ or topographic loads are not present [Turcotte and Schubert, 1982; Watts, 2001; Hasterok and Chapman, 2007].”
New ultrahigh‐resolution picture of Earth's gravity field (2013, unknown): “, Torge, [2001]; Watts, [2001]; Wieczorek, [2007]).”
The relationship between shear wave velocity, temperature, attenuation and viscosity in the shallow part of the mantle (2013, background): “The original definition corresponded to what is now generally known as the elastic thickness (see Watts, 2001) and is now rarely used.”
3‐D multiobservable probabilistic inversion for the compositional and thermal structure of the lithosphere and upper mantle. I: a priori petrological information and geophysical observables (2013, background): “…the simplest and most commonly used geophysical observables for investigating lithospheric features [Zeyen and Fernàndez, 1994; Zeyen et al., 2005; Ebbing et al., 2006; Jiménez-Munt et al., 2008; Chappell and Kusznir, 2008; Kaban et al., 2010; Watts, 2001; Jacoby and Smilde, 2009, amongst others].”
High‒degree gravity models from GRAIL primary mission data (2013, unknown): “By subtracting the topographical contribution from the estimated gravity field Bouguer gravity is obtained, which reflects subsurface structures and is often used in studies of compensation states [e.g., Watts, 2001] and crustal thickness [e.g., Wieczorek et al., 2013].”
Three-dimensional finite-element modelling of Earth's viscoelastic deformation: effects of lateral variations in lithospheric thickness (2003, background): “1 is derived from a compilation of elastic plate thicknesses from Watts (2001).”
Gravity and Topography of the Terrestrial Planets (2015, background): “…estimates have been obtained by modeling the topographic and gravity signatures of these features, and it is widely accepted that the elastic thickness is dependent primarily upon the age of the plate at the time of loading, with Te being less than about 45 km (for a review, see Watts, 2001).”
Gravity anomalies, flexure and the elastic thickness structure of the India–Eurasia collisional system (2005, methodology): “These values are significantly less than those estimated by Watts and Cox [51] on the basis of the width of the lavas, but agree with the value of 8 km recovered from spectral analysis along profiles [15].”