Isolation and Analysis of Key Components of Seafloor Relief

摘要

We are continuing to investigate several hypotheses regarding the processes thatare responsible for forming the various components of seafloor relief and the composite seafloor roughness. We have put forward the hypothesis that the composite seafloor relief can be meaningfully divided into three or more distinctive spatial wavebands each of which can be related to different physical processes. Our goal is to understand the operative geological processes well enough to be able to better predict the complete seafloor/basement roughness characteristics where it has not been measured and for regions where it is difficult or impossible to measure accurately (e.g., buried basement relief).