Geophysical data combination for a 3D model of the Mediterranean Sea: first results

The Mediterranean Sea area is an important region of the world and the knowledge of its characteristics is crucial not only for scientific but also industrial purposes, like guiding companies towards an optimal exploitation of the available resources in the area. Over the years, many research institutions, as well as private companies, have performed seismic campaigns aimed at inferring the characteristics and principal features of the crust in this region. By analysing the scientific literature on the area, many data sets, in the form of maps, interpreted seismic profiles or scattered data, that model small regions of the Mediterranean Sea area, mainly in terms of depths of geological horizons, can easily be retrieved. What is actually hard to find is comprehensive information on the entire Mediterranean Sea area. In this framework, the principal purpose of this work is to exploit all data sets, retrievable in literature, that model the main geological horizons of various parts of the Mediterranean Sea area and combine them with the aim of obtaining a full 3D model covering the whole region. The idea is to build a 3D model, completed by the density and magnetic susceptibility distributions, and an estimate of its accuracy.