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Oceanic mantle gravimetric response to the seafloor spreading of the

Southwest Sub‐basin, South China Sea

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DOI: 10.1002/gj.2799

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GEOLOGICAL JOURNAL
Geol. J. (2016)
Published online in Wiley Online Library
(wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI: 10.1002/gj.2799

Oceanic mantle gravimetric response to the seafloor spreading of the Southwest

Sub-basin, South China Sea
CHUANCHUAN LÜ1*, TIANYAO HAO1, YONGJIAN YAO2, JIAN XING1 and XUELIN QIU3
1
Key Lab of Petroleum Resources Research, Institute of Geology and Geophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing
100029, China
2
Guangzhou Marine Geological Survey, China Geological Survey, Guangzhou 510075, China
3
Key Lab of Marginal Sea Geology, South China Sea Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guangzhou
510301, China

The residual mantle gravity anomaly (RMA) is a straightforward response of the deep mantle structure of the lithosphere. We acquired RMA
from newly updated free-air gravity anomaly by incorporating abundant geophysical evidences, such as the International Ocean Drilling Pro-
gram expedition 349, the interpretation of 10 seismic profiles and the bathymetric data in the Southwest Sub-basin (SWSB) of the South China
Sea. By inverting the crustal thickness by the application of the isostatic flexure analysis, comparing with ocean bottom seismic tomography
result, then determining a detail crustal thickness of the study region, we calculated the RMA of the oceanic basin in the SWSB. The main
features of the RMA and their relation to the palaeo-spreading pattern are discussed, and the implications of the asymmetric lithospheric de-
formation due to variations in melt extraction are proposed. In the light of the asymmetric RMA at the north and south sides of the fossil
spreading centre in the SWSB, we preferred asymmetric melt retention depth and extraction rate changes during the oceanic lithosphere cre-
ation of the South China Sea. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Received 29 September 2015; accepted 26 February 2016

KEY WORDS South China Sea; residual mantle gravity anomaly; oceanic mantle; basement structure; flexural isostasy analysis

1. INTRODUCTION anomaly of the upper mantle structure, the residual mantle

The process of seafloor spreading through a series of mantle
lithospheric dynamics in the oceanic lithosphere is generally
considered to be the consequence of melt extracting and
crustal accretion in the upper mantle structure (Blackman
and Kendall, 2002). Because the spreading rate above
20 mm year
1 will be independent of the crustal thickness
(Chen and Morgan, 1996), lateral crustal thickness change
only plays a minor role in gravity anomaly, and the residual
mantle structure revealed by residual mantle anomaly will
show the mantle density changes across the axis (Kuo and
Forsyth, 1988; Lin et al., 1990; Lin and Morgan, 1992). De-
spite the average crustal thickness, cold thermal structure
with a strong lithosphere means anisotropic magma distribu-
tion along the slow-spreading ridge (Lin and Morgan, 1992),
which leads the mantle’s density structure across the ridge
shows anisotropy (Michael et al., 2003). Therefore, gravity
*Correspondence to: C. Lü, Key Lab of Petroleum Resources Research, In-
stitute of Geology and Geophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing
100029, China. E-mail: clu@mail.iggcas.ac.cn
anomaly (RMA), can thus provide us with knowledge of
the processes that have formed oceanic lithosphere at differ-
ent times and under a variety of conditions, which is a
straightforward response of the deep mantle structure of
the lithosphere.
It is not easy to separate the RMA from the gravimetric ob-
servation; the anomaly of the sedimentary and crust layers
will affect the observation greatly, and many works have
been conducted only to evaluate the crustal thickness varia-
tions throughout the oceanic lithosphere around the world
by gravity inversion with assumptions of the empirical rela-
tionship between density and depth for shallow crust (Karner
et al., 2005; Tašárová, 2007; Deng et al., 2014). A few stud-
ies have examined the relationship between residual mantle
anomaly and the upper mantle structure but focused on the
formation of the Mid-Atlantic Ocean Ridge, by using thermal
structure constraint, and the RMA corresponding to the abys-
sal hill morphology roughness is discussed in a different seg-
ment (Thibaud et al., 1998). The hotspot affecting the
seafloor spreading with abundant melt production at the
MAR axis has a clear attribute in RMA (Gente et al., 2003),

Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

 C. LÜ ET AL.
which has been attributed enormous volumes of basaltic
magma generated on or near the ridge axis (Schilling,
1985) and enriched mantle chemical compositions (Yu
et al., 1997). The RMA can also be shown as large as the dif-
ferences between the generic depleted mantle and the
enriched in the Atlantic plumes (Cannat et al., 1999). Be-
sides, RMA can be used to invert the crustal thickness to clas-
sified the end-member patterns of spatial distribution and
volumes of potential melt in the North Atlantic (Wang
et al., 2011) and East Pacific Rise (Wang et al., 1996). But
their study assumed the crustal thickness as unknown, with
the assumption of homogeneous mantle with various melt pro-
duction, and provided the sedimentary layer thickness and
density with global data and empirical values, which would
greatly affect the final inversion result. Here, we used an isos-
tasy flexure inversion approach as an independent method to
obtain the crustal thickness (Braitenberg et al., 2002). A sim-
ilar approach has been used in the calculation of the isostatic
lithospheric thickness in Eastern Alps where the response of
the density contrast at the crust–mantle boundary and
intracrustal density can be investigated by inversion (Ebbing,
2004). In the South China Sea (SCS), Braitenberg (2006)
employed isostasy flexure inversion to calculate the base-
ment roughness with the global sedimentary data, although
we think the isostasy equilibrium status of the continental
margins and oceanic basins of the SCS is not the same. In
our case, the isostatic condition is perfectly applicable into
the southwest sub-basin (SWSB), the oceanic basin of SCS.
With the estimation of the crustal loads, which are greatly de-
termined by seawater depth, basement depth, crustal thick-
ness and their respective densities, the flexure of the
lithosphere can be calculated; thus, the gravity effect above
the mantle can be calculated as well. Besides, we can deduct
the oceanic lithosphere thermal gravity anomaly by crust
ages with the lithospheric cooling model (Turcotte and
Schubert, 2002); thus, RMA can reflect the variations in
mantle densities solely (Magde and Detrick, 1995).
In this paper, we use the constraint parameters for the crustal
and sedimentary layer thickness from several deep seismic pro-
files transecting the oceanic lithosphere region in the SWSB of
the SCS, combining updated free-air gravity anomaly based on
satellites (Sandwell et al., 2013) and the bathymetric data
(GMRT) (Ryan et al., 2009) with the International Ocean Dril-
ling Program (IODP) expedition 349 result (Li et al., 2015),
inverting the crustal thickness by the application of the isostatic
flexure analysis (Braitenberg et al., 2007), the RMA of the oce-
anic lithosphere was determined.
2. GEOLOGICAL BACKGROUND
The SCS is a marginal sea among the intersections of the
tectonic plates of the Eurasian, Pacific and Indo-Australian
Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
plates. It is considered to experience several episodic rifting
events during late Cretaceous to Paleogene period before the
final detachment of the continental margins (Taylor and
Hayes, 1980; Taylor and Hayes, 1983; Ru and Pigott,
1986; Briais et al., 1993; Sun et al., 2009; Cullen et al.,
2010; Franke et al., 2014). Although the exact location of
oceanic basin in the northeastern margin of the SCS is still
under debate, because the exact locations of the northeastern
continental–oceanic boundary (COB) is imprecise (Briais
et al., 1993; Hsu et al., 2004; Hwang and Chang, 2014;
Lester et al., 2014; McIntosh et al., 2014; Doo et al.,
2015), the age of the central oceanic basin, which includes
the east sub-basin (ESB) and the SWSB, generally comes
to an agreement proposed by Taylor and Hayes in 1980. Af-
ter the deep tow magnetic survey (Li et al., 2014) and IODP
expedition 349 (Li et al., 2015), the cessation age of the sea-
floor spreading in the ESB and the SWSB were confirmed as
15 and 16 Ma, respectively. Although we are still uncertain
of the exact initiative age of the seafloor spreading of the
central basins, the opinion that the SWSB was initiated after
ESB, and a southward ridge jump happened around 23.6 Ma
(between magnetic isochrons 7 and 6C) with a counterclock-
wise orienting, is generally accepted by the academia (Briais
et al., 1993; Li et al., 2014).
The SWSB, an oceanic basin, was located in the south-
western part of the SCS, separated by rigid blocks (Maccles-
field Bank and Reed Bank) and formed by ridge propagation
southwestward until the asthenosphere stopped upwelling
around 16 Ma. Its oceanic basin is outlined by COB, which
is between 3000 and 3500 isobaths and separated from the
ESN by a Zhongnan fracture zone around 116°E in N–S di-
rection. Multibeams bathymetric result shows the SWSB can
be divided into four subregions according to different tec-
tonic characteristics, which implies different evolution
stages (Li et al., 2012), and our study region (grey shaded
area shown in Fig. 1) corresponds to the subregion B as sug-
gested by Li et al. (2012) where the fossil spreading ridge
covered by thinner sedimentary layer and the oceanic litho-
sphere was mature before seafloor spreading ceased.
Therefore, it was more qualified than other subregions for
its limited magma activity, mature oceanic normal faults
and fewer seamounts. Recently, IODP expedition 349 re-
vealed the post-spreading sediment of the SWSB, and ESB
was from the same proximal continental margin far from
the South China continent, which provided carbonate mate-
rials and transported with turbidity currents into the SWSB
abyssal plain, implying the seismic attributes for the sedi-
mentary layer are uniform at the SWSB and the southern
part of ESB (Li et al., 2015). Because the full spreading rate
of SWSB dropped sharply from nearly 70 mm year
1 to a
steady rate of 20 mm year
1 after the ridge jump, the melting
extraction at the SWSB should differ greatly compared with
the ESB whose full spreading rate varies from 35 to
Geol. J. (2016)
DOI: 10.1002/gj
 MANTLE GRAVITY ANOMALY OF THE SOUTH CHINA SEA

Figure 1. Bathymetry map of the study region in the SWSB of the SCS (grey shaded area). The continent ocean boundary (COB) is outlined as a brown line.
The bathymetry of 3500 m isobaths is shown as a thin white line. The stars show positions of the IODP expedition 349 drill sites in the basin, and the fossil
spreading centre is shown as a thick dashed line, while the thin white lines marks the magnetic isochrons re-identified by deep-tow magnetic survey result.
The seismic profiles are shown as thin dashed lines, which are in yellow, white, green and orange colours.

15 mm year
1 (Li et al., 2014). By studying the gravity field
of residual mantle structure in the abyssal plain of the
SWSB, we can estimate the retained melt due to the spread-
ing rate changes because the residual mantle gravity anom-
aly records the palaeo-spreading melt extraction pattern
accordingly.
3. DATA SETS
The data sets of this study are from several parities, global
database and our collaborated project group, which include
bathymetry, free-air gravity anomalies (FAA), global sedi-
ment thickness model, multichannels seismic (MCS)
transects and ocean bottom seismometers (OBS) deep seis-
mic transect. These data sets are described in detail as
follows.
3.1. Bathymetry and free-air gravity anomaly
The bathymetry data are extracted from the General Bathy-
metric Chart of the Oceans Digital Atlas 2014 grid
(GEBCO_2014) and synthesized with several multibeams
data source by Global Multi-Resolution Topography synthe-
sis (GMRT) with a resolution of 30 arc sec (Ryan et al.,
2009). Compared with the last version GEBCO grid
‘GEBCO_08’, which was originally derived both from
SRTM30_plus (Becker et al., 2009) and a database of over

Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Geol. J. (2016)

DOI: 10.1002/gj
 C. LÜ ET AL.
290 million bathymetric soundings, the updated
GEBCO_2014 grid incorporates more sounding profiles
and multibeams data with GMRT in the SCS region
(GEBCO_2014 grid documents annex A.11) (Ryan et al.,
2009). Although the bathymetric data SRTM15_PLUS
(Becker et al., 2009) have a higher resolution compared with
GEBCO_2014 grid, because it is mainly derived from
CryoSat-2 and other altimetry satellites and the FAA are
from satellites, CryoSat-2 and Jason-1 (Sandwell et al.,
2014), we prefer GEBCO-2014 grid in general to keep the
bathymetric data and the FAA data as two independent
parameters.
More inspirationally, the satellite-derived FAA data were
newly updated with 1 arc min resolution, which has an accu-
racy of about 2 mGal, which has a resolution of 7 km
(Sandwell et al., 2014) and which can be used for detecting
even finer-scale gravity signatures, such as the continent–
ocean boundary (Hwang and Chang, 2014). The average
spacing of the magnetic anomalies isochrones is more than
10 km (Li et al., 2014), whose effect is caused by the geologi-
cal bodies with a lower than 10 km resolution, it means that the
FAA is more than enough for our study.
3.2. Sediment thickness and seismic profiles
The gravitational and loading effect of the sedimentary layer
can greatly affect our residual gravity anomaly calculation.
In most regions of the SCS oceanic basins, the sediment av-
erage thickness is around 0.5 km, and much thicker sedi-
ments occur, as thick as 2 km in the continental margins.
By comparing with the sedimentary thickness extracted from
several MCS profiles as shown in Figure 1, we found that
the global sediment thickness data set, total sediment thick-
ness of the world’s oceans and marginal seas, version 2
(Whittaker et al., 2013), overestimates sedimentary thick-
ness in the study region by around 0.6 km. Besides, the fact
that the sedimentary grid whose resolution is 5 arc min is far
lower that our bathymetric and FAA data sets, so we need to
construct a refined sedimentary thickness by incorporating
our MCS interpretation result. Altogether, we employed 10
seismic profiles transecting the study region in SWSB (refer
to Supporting Information for MCS detail) to re-interpret
profiles in light of the result of IODP expedition 349 drilling
hole U1433B. In general, eight MCS profiles (four green,
two white and two orange dashed lines in Figure 1) were ac-
quired by M/V TANBAO of Guangzhou Marine Geology
Survey with a 480-channel streamer recorded at a sample
rate of 2 ms; the detailed images of the seismic profiles can
be found in several other papers (Li et al., 2012; Ding
et al., 2015; Ding et al., 2016). Another two MCS profiles
(SO49-22 and SO49-23 in thin dashed lines) were acquired
during the ‘Joint Sino–German SONNE 49 Cruise’ in 1987
with a 48-channel streamer recorded at a sample rate of
Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
4 ms, and its detailed interpretation could be found in other
research papers as well (Franke et al., 2011; Li et al.,
2012; Franke et al., 2014).
During the National Basic Research Program of China
Project ‘South China Sea continental margin geodynamics’,
along with the NH973-1 and NH973-3 acquisition, a wide-
angle seismic transect ‘OBS973’ ocean bottom seismometer
(OBS) profile across the SWSB from the Paracel (Xisha)
Islands region to Spratly (Nansha) Islands, in April 2009
(Lü et al., 2011; Qiu et al., 2011). This transect was con-
ducted by two legs of South China Sea scientific exploring
legs performed by R/V SHIYAN 2 of the South China Sea
Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
4. METHODS OF ANALYSIS
The FAA (gfaa) in the marine gravimetric survey is a direct
measurement at sea level after several gravity corrections,
such as Eövtös correction and latitude correction, which
counts the geological features of the abyssal plan, seamounts,
volcanism activity and the cooling and subsidence effect of
the lithosphere as a whole. It combines gravity effect of sev-
eral elements as follows: the seawater layer (gw), the rough-
ness (terrain) of the seafloor topography (gt), the
sedimentary layer (oceanic crust layer 1) (gs), the crustal
layer (oceanic crust layer 2 and layer 3) (gc), gravity effect
of a volcanic body or seamounts (gv) and density change
caused by thermal cooling during seafloor spreading (gT).
Therefore, the gravity effect of oceanic mantle, which is re-
sidual mantle anomaly (grma), can be expressed as
grma ¼ gfaa
gw
gt
gs
gc
gv
gT (1)
Our approach needs to calculate RMA of SWSB with a
layer-stripping scheme. It involves a series of steps as shown
in the workflow (Fig. 2), which includes (A) gravimetric cal-
culation to remove gw and gt, (B) constructing a refined sed-
imentary thickness model of SWSB to remove gs, (C)
determining oceanic crustal thickness by flexure isostasy
analysis to remove gc, (D) spatial filtering to remove gv
and thermal correction to remove gT. At the last step, we ob-
tain the residual mantle anomaly with a resolution of 7 and
58 km, across and along the direction of magnetic anomaly
isochrons, respectively, (as shown in Fig. 1), which are
due to the resolution of the FAA data and the spacing of
the MCS profiles in SWSB.
4.1. Step A: removing gravity effects of seawater (gw) and
seafloor terrain (gt)
The gravity anomaly of seawater and terrain correction are
calculated in the spatial domain using the method proposed
Geol. J. (2016)
DOI: 10.1002/gj
 MANTLE GRAVITY ANOMALY OF THE SOUTH CHINA SEA

Figure 2. Flowchart illustrating the procedure of modelling to calculate the residual mantle anomaly (RMA). Details of A, B, C and D are explained in the
methodology section.

Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Geol. J. (2016)

DOI: 10.1002/gj
 C. LÜ ET AL.
by Talwani and Ewing (Blakely, 1995), by describing layers
with approximately 0.3 km by 0.3 km polygons laminated in
the ellipsoidal coordinate system. The terrain correlation was
performed with a distance of 166.735 km (Lü et al., 2009)
that is the standard in gravity correction (Nowell et al.,
1999). With the density of seawater is 1.03 × 103 kg m
3,
adding a seafloor terrain correction, we eliminated gravity
effect of water bodies to a minimum.
4.2. Step B: sedimentary thickness model construction and
its correction (gs)
The fossil ridge, abyssal plains and other geological fea-
tures in the SWSB are thickly covered by sediments.
When comparing sediment thickness from the global data
set with MCS profiles, we find that it overestimates the
sedimentary thickness in SWSB. Especially in the oceanic
basin, the discrepancies between the global data set and
MCS profile are around 0.6 km in general. To better re-
move the gravity effect of the sedimentary layer, we used
10 MCS profiles interpretation results as constraints for
sedimentary thickness to modify the model of global sed-
imentary thickness data.
Most of the MCS profiles transecting the magnetic anom-
aly isochrones in the study region and NH973-2A provide a
crosslink tie for correlation of sediment thickness. In 2015,
Figure 3. (a) Basement depth map constrained by the reinterpretation result of MCS profiles, dashed line circled the study region and (b) equivalent basaltic
basement depth map by taking account of the seawater and sedimentary layer loading.
Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
IODP expedition 349 conducted two drill sites (U1433 and
U1434) and obtained a complete suite of logging samples
from sea bottom to oceanic basalt in U1433, which provides
solid stratigraphic evidence to help us reinterpret seismic
profile and do time-depth conversion with a more accurate
formula (Li et al., 2015)
Z ¼ 0:000152626t2 þ 0:714658t (2)
Here, t stands for the two-way travel time in milliseconds
starting from the seafloor, and Z is the depth of metres below
the seafloor. We employed point Kriging geostatistical
gridding method with a unanimous search radius of 50 km
to do interpolation (Isaaks and Srivastava, 1989), because
the 10 MCS profiles are not evenly distributed in our study
region and MCS profiles cover irregularly along the direc-
tion of magnetics anomaly isochrones. In our study region
(inside dashed white line as shown in Fig. 3a), the basement
depth map (Fig. 3a) we constructed shows the clear mor-
phology of the graben/half-graben by the southeast of the
fossil ridge in the oceanic basin of SWSB.
Another important factor that affects the sediment grav-
ity estimation is knowledge of the density distribution with
depth. Combining the results of physical property measure-
ments from Holes U1433A and U1433B (Li et al., 2015),
we used the depth-density exponential function to estimate
Geol. J. (2016)
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 MANTLE GRAVITY ANOMALY OF THE SOUTH CHINA SEA
sedimentary density variations with sediment porosity (Φz)
and sediment thickness (z) (Sawyer, 1985).
ρz ¼ Φz ρw þ ð1
Φ0 e
cz Þρg
where ρw is the seawater density and ρg is the grain density,
Φ0 is the initial sediment porosity at the sea bottom, c is a de-
termined decay rate by core logging with units 1 m
1 and z
is the depth below sea bottom. We obtained the values of
ρg, Φ0 and c from IODP 349, which are 2.8 × 103 kg m
3,
80%, 0.004, respectively (Li et al., 2015).
4.3. Step C: flexure isostasy analysis and crustal thickness
calculation (gc)
The next modelling step is to determine the Moho undula-
tion to remove the crustal gravity effect with a more con-
vincing method other than gravity inversion. The isostasy
flexure analysis using convolution method (Braitenberg
et al., 2002, 2003, 2007) was used to calculate the point load
flexure response of the crustal load based on flexure isostasy
(Watts, 2001). As for the oceanic plate flexure model, the
flexure crust response is easy to be calculated with sliding
windows in the spatial domain (Braitenberg et al., 2002);
then the flexure Moho undulation was estimated by calculat-
ing the effective elastic thickness (Te) as a byproduct. This
Figure 4. (a) Gravity Moho from the inversion algorithm by Parker–Oldenburg. (b) Flexure Moho from the flexure isostasy analysis.
Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
flexure analysis requires estimation of total load including
the seawater and sediment, which means the seawater layer
and sedimentary layer are used as the crustal and the inner
(3) loads, respectively. Before we do the flexure analysis, we
built an equivalent basaltic basement model (Fig. 3b) as in-
put. The gravity inversion Moho (Fig. 4a) by the Parker–
Oldenburg algorithm (Oldenburg, 1974) is another input to
do the flexure analysis, which was used for comparing the
flexure Moho to obtain minimum RMS. During the proce-
dure of the flexure analysis, we tested a series parameter of
square sliding windows of 100, 50, 20 and 10 km to do the
flexure calculation and the gravity Parker–Oldenburg inver-
sion by comparing the result with the seismic tomography
Moho for the transect OBS973-1 and OBS973-3 (Lü et al.,
2011; Qiu et al., 2011). As shown in Figure 5b, the flexure
Moho (thick dashed line), which we calculated with a sliding
window of 10 km and crust density of 2.8 × 103 kg m
3, has
a better fit to the seismic Moho (solid line) compared with
the gravity inversion Moho (thin dotted line). For more de-
tails of the optimal choice of the convolution radius, one
can refer to the discussion published by Braitenberg et al.
(2002, 2003).
One import factor may affect the difference between the
wide-angle seismic Moho undulations, and flexure Moho
undulations may be the seamount loading. It affects the elas-
tic thickness (Te) and the long-wavelength component of the
gravity field, which gives a physical model of the Moho
Geol. J. (2016)
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 C. LÜ ET AL.

Figure 5. (a) The thermal gravity correction and residual mantle anomaly (RMA) along the oceanic basin part in OBS973 transect. The dashed line is the ther-
mal correction, and the solid line is RMA. (b) The seismic Moho, gravity Moho and flexure Moho along the oceanic basin part in OBS973 transect. The solid
line is seismic Moho, the thin dotted line is gravity Moho and the thick dashed line is flexure Moho.

undulations on the basis of the theory of flexural isostasy.
For our flexure analysis, we did not consider the seamount
load, but it definitely does bias our FAA and our RMBA cal-
culation. Therefore, seamount gravity effect (gv) needs to be
removed.
4.4. Step D: seamount gravity effect (gv) and thermal
gravity correction (gT)
Although the seamounts in SWSB have a negligible effect
on the total flexure loading in the regional scale, it would
bias FAA due to its shallow and abnormal density above
the basement. Here, we employ optimal robust separator fil-
ter to produce the best separation because it was designed to
separate the regional and residual bathymetry of Hawaiian
Islands originally in the spatial domain (Wessel, 2016). Its
procedure is independent with the power spectra of the
regional and residual components, and the choice of filter
width can be determined by the seamounts diameter multiple
by 1.2377 (Wessel, 1998). Therefore, we tested several me-
dian filters compared with the high-resolution bathymetry
map to remove the gravity effect (gv) of the Zhongnan Sea-
mounts (Fig. 6)
The thermal effect in the mantle is last but not the least el-
ement in our equation 1, because while the newly created
oceanic lithosphere was created, it is cooled by the seawater
and contracts thus increases in density. The newly rigid
plates formed and moved away from the spreading ridge
and the ocean depth increase with increasing age; therefore,
the thermal structure can be solved by using 2D heat con-
duction equation (Turcotte and Schubert, 2002). Although
several plate models have been proposed for thermal estima-
tion of the oceanic lithospheric mantle, including the half-
space cooling (HS) model, the Parsons and Sclater model,

Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Geol. J. (2016)

DOI: 10.1002/gj
 MANTLE GRAVITY ANOMALY OF THE SOUTH CHINA SEA

Figure 6. (a) and (b) The gravity anomaly before and after removing the seamount gravity anomaly with optimal robust separator (ORS) spatial filter, and the
black circle encompasses the study region with a radius of 166.735 km. (c) and (d) The seamounts identified by the ORS filter, which are circled in red dots with
50 mGal spatial filter parameter.

global depth and heat model and constant heat flow applied
on the bottom lithospheric isotherm model (Davis and
Lister, 1974; Parsons and Sclater, 1977; Stein and Stein,
1992; Doin and Fleitout, 1996), they all overpredict heat
flow, and their estimations have no obvious difference in
young age lithosphere (i.e. <50 Myr) (Stüwe, 2007).
Therefore, we employed HS model to estimate our ther-
mal oceanic mantle structure with only one variable, the
oceanic crustal age, to be defined. Because the newly
deep-tow magnetic data (Li et al., 2014) showed consistency
with the global oceanic crustal age grid (Muller et al., 2008),
the age of SWSB interpreted from marine magnetic iso-
chrons is around 25–16 Ma (Briais et al., 1993). We used
the HS cooling model and assume the temperature 0 °C
(T0) at the surface and 1350 °C (Tb) at 120 km depth, which
is upper mantle, and with thermal expansion equation

Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Geol. J. (2016)

DOI: 10.1002/gj

Figure 7. (a) Lithosphere thermal correction of the study region. The shaded area is our study region with MCS constraints, the red solid lines are magnetic
isochrons, and the red dashed line is fossil spreading centre. (b) Residual mantle anomaly of the SWSB. The shaded area is the region with the seismic con-
straint, the red solid lines are magnetic isochrons, and the red dashed line is fossil spreading centre.
Δρ ¼ ðT0
Tb Þ α ρ0
where ρ0 is the primitive mantle density 3.3 × 103 kg m
3 and
α is the coefficient of thermal expansion 3 × 10
5 °C
1. The
thermal structure was then converted into a 3D density grid,
and its calculated thermal gravity correction (gv) map in our
study region is shown in Figure 7a.
5. RESULT AND DISCUSSION
The age of oceanic lithosphere between magnetic isochrons
C6n and C5En is around 19 Ma (Li et al., 2014), and the
IODP site U1433 was drilled above in the south side of fos-
sil spreading ridge (Li et al., 2015). During the seafloor
spreading of the SWSB, the full spreading rate was kept at
40 km year
1 for the whole periods of the oceanic litho-
spheric accretion (Briais et al., 1993). Although the south
sides of the fossil spreading ridge show a large basin area,
the total melt extraction of the slow spreading ridge kept
steady but not the melt production (Lizarralde et al., 2004).
Besides, the crustal thickness of the oceanic basin is sym-
metrical on either side of the fossil spreading ridge (Fig. 4b).
As a consequence of the symmetrical crustal age and thick-
ness, their thermal structure shows no great difference above
the crustal age around 19 Ma (Fig. 7a). However, the afore-
mentioned RMA, which shows 20–30 mGal discrepancy in
Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
C. LÜ ET AL.
(4) average on either side, is caused by the density variations
of the mantle.
The observed variation of the RMA values at slow spread-
ing oceanic lithosphere may be the result of a combination of
mechanisms (Magde and Detrick, 1995), and three possible
sources of anomalously low mantle densities could be ex-
plained: the presence of hotter upwelling mantle, mantle de-
pletion due to the changes of the Fe/Mg ratio (Oxburgh and
Parmentier, 1977) and the retention of melt in the upwelling
mantle (Ito et al., 1996; Lizarralde et al., 2004). And those
elements can be used by numerical flow model to investigate
the relative impact to the observed RMA (Sparks et al.,
1993), which showed that the compositional density effect
for 25% melt depletion was assumed to be equivalent to
375 °C of thermal expansion, while the density melt contrast
was set up for 0.5 × 103 kg m
3, because the chemical com-
position analysis result showed the average rate of depleted
mantle is around 2–3% (Workman and Hart, 2005) and ther-
mal variation is less than 60 °C beneath the normal oceanic
ridges (Shen and Forsyth, 1995). Density variations caused
by the thermal expansion of the upwelling mantle and den-
sity reduction caused by melt composition extraction have
a negligible effect, which is 20 mGal for 2.5% depletion rate
at most on gravity anomaly (Magde and Detrick, 1995;
Schutt and Lesher, 2006).
By comparison, the melt retention can result in a rela-
tively large gravity anomaly. The passive flow modelling
Geol. J. (2016)
DOI: 10.1002/gj
 MANTLE GRAVITY ANOMALY OF THE SOUTH CHINA SEA
showed that 3% melt retention is equal to heating the man-
tle to 107 °C (Jha et al., 1994; Ito et al., 1996), which sug-
gested 5 mGal for 6% melt retention. For the study of the
oceanic lithosphere of the SWSB, the spreading ridge
ceased at 16 Ma, so the only factors that would affect the
gravity effect of the melt retention are two, density differ-
ence between the melt and mantle and the retention depth,
where the transformation of olivine tholeiite to eclogite be-
gins (Ringwood and Green, 1966). As gravity anomaly as-
sociated with six different mantles by the passive flow model
(Magde and Detrick, 1995) suggested, along with the same
spreading axial (the same magnetic isochrons), composi-
tional density variations also have a negligible effect on ax-
ial gravity anomaly. Therefore, we can give an assumption
that the melt retention depth between the north and south
side of the fossil spreading ridge must be different. And in-
ferred gravity anomaly of oceanic lithosphere between 110
and 145 Ma (Lizarralde et al., 2004), we speculated that at
least 5 mGal RMA discrepancy was caused by different re-
tention depths between the north and the south. The final
breakup of the continental margin of the SWSB is caused
by the detachment fault (Ding et al., 2013; Franke et al.,
2014), which caused asymmetric upper plate or lower plate
margins around the oceanic basin of the SWSB, and the
fracture zone caused by the detachment or normal faults
would play an important role for the melt injection into
seawater. Thus, the unevenly distributed melt production
rate on either side of the fossil spreading ridge can cause
the different depth of the melt retention.
6. CONCLUSION
The main features of the RMA of the SWSB in the SCS
are distinct low gravity over the fossil spreading centre,
little variation along the direction of the palaeo-spreading
axis and wider area of high gravity on the southeast side.
They are considered as key evidence for the asymmetric
pattern of the mantle upwelling and magma flux on either
side of the fossil spreading ridge. The high RMA on the
south side may indicate excess melting of the primitive
mantle material, and the melting was redistributed
differently along the final detachment fault zone at the
time when lithosphere broke up. The fracture zone may
work as a brittle–ductile transition for melt injection,
which indicates that the final detachment rifting of the
continental margin may have resulted in different litho-
sphere isostatic condition on either side of the fossil
spreading ridge. Thus, our explanation for the observed
RMA is that the final detachment fracture contributes sig-
nificantly to the upwelling mantle distribution and its re-
tention in the mantle.
Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This study was funded by the Natural Science Foundation of
China (NSFC grant 41476033, 41404050, U1505232,
41576068, 41404073 and 41276029). We are grateful to
the crew and science parties of M/V TANBAO operated
by Guangzhou Marine Geology Survey (GMGS) for their
contribution to data acquisition. Figures were drawn using
the GMT software of Wessel (1998), and the Moho Depth
calculation in gravity isostasy was inverted by using the
LithoFlex tool of Braitenberg et al. (2007). For data
accessing of NH973 and OBS973 MCS and OBS data,
please contact Prof. Jiang Wei-Wei (wwjiang@mail.iggcas.
ac.cn) of Institute of Geology and Geophysics, Chinese
Academy of Sciences. We appreciate review comments from
Dr Zhao Minghui and one anonymous reviewer for their
help in improving the paper.
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online version of this article at the publisher’s web site.
Geol. J. (2016)
DOI: 10.1002/gj