Correcting Airborne Gravity Data for Overburden thickness: A case study from the Nechako interior plateau, British Columbia

Large areas of bedrock in Canada, such as in the interior plateau of British Columbia, are covered by a thick glacial overburden. Lateral variations in overburden thickness can create spurious anomalies in gravity data. These anomalies can be of similar size and amplitude as those associated with mineral bodies and can be mistaken for them. A methodology is introduced that corrects gravity data for changes in overburden thickness through the use of a bedrock topography map created by integrating information from a helicopter transient electromagnetic survey with geological survey data, well water data, and gravel pit locations. The approach is tested for a 68 x 38 km2 area in the prospective Nechako interior plateau of British Columbia, Canada. The methodology extends the traditional Bouguer corrections by taking into account the gravitational contribution of the overburden. Results show that the capability of an airborne survey at detecting a change in overburden thickness depends primarily on survey line spacing, and to a lesser extent to the level of random noise in the gravity data. The bedrock topography correction has the capability to remove the gravitational attraction of overburden for the purpose of revealing, through interpretation, geological structures in the gravity data that originate from the bedrock and were otherwise concealed.The accepted manuscript in pdf format is listed with the files at the bottom of this page. The presentation of the authors' names and (or) special characters in the title of the manuscript may differ slightly between what is listed on this page and what is listed in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript; that in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript is what was submitted by the author