Spectral analysis has been used for studying a variety of geologic structures and processes, such as estimation of the depth to the crystalline basement or estimation of the Curie temperatu...

The discrete wavelet transform (dwt), using the good property of localization of wavelet bases has been used as a powerful tool in filtering and denoising problems. The continuous wavelet transform (cwt) exploits the upward continuation properties of the field horizontal derivative and allows the location of potential field singularities in a simple geometrical manner. Within the cwt space-scale framework, the lines formed by joining, at different scales, the modulus maxima of the wavelet coefficients (multiscale edge detection method) intersect each other at the position of the point source or along the edges of the causative body. As long as the multiscale edge detection method is applied to experimental data the procedure may, however, fail, since the observed anomalies are the superposition of effects of sources having different density contrast, geometrical size and depths. We show that wavelet transform modulus maxima lines attributed to deep sources do not converge toward the true depths, but yield completely erroneous solutions. On the other hand, use of nth-order derivatives of the potential field allows the enhancement of the shallowest source effects, preventing us from obtaining information on the deeper ones. In this paper we therefore try to overcome this problem by a joint application of cwt and dwt. A localized dwt filter coupled to compactness criterion allows the separation of the effects due to the deeper sources from those of the shallower ones. Hence, the multiscale edge detection method, applied separately to the original and the filtered signals enabled the estimation of the depth of shallower and deeper sources, respectively. This analysis, performed on the gravity anomalies of Sardinia (Italy), has given estimations of the depths to both the Campidano graben and the Moho discontinuity, in good agreement with previous interpretations of gravity and seismic data.

To investigate the crustal magnetic structure, it is important to assess the susceptibility and remanence properties of rocks and ores. In this paper, we propose a method to extract the contributions of induced and remanent magnetization from modeling of magnetic anomalies. We first estimate the direction of the total magnetization vector by studying the reduced‐to‐pole anomaly and its correlation with different magnitude magnetic transforms. Then we invert the magnetic data to obtain the volumetric distribution of the magnetization intensity. As the third step, based on a priori information about the Koenigsberger ratio derived from petrophysical measurements, we extract the distributions in the source volume of the induced and remanent magnetization intensities, based on a generalized relationship involving the total and remanent magnetizations, and the true susceptibility. In this way, we are able to produce separate maps of the anomaly fields attributed to the physical magnetic source parameters: remanent and induced magnetization. After validating the method with synthetic data, we analyze the data relative to the Mesozoic and Cenozoic igneous rocks in Yeshan region, eastern China. The analysis of the separated magnetization components reveals that the intrusion of dioritic and basaltic rocks occurred at different geological periods, and the basaltic rocks were magnetized by a reversed geomagnetic field. The uncertainty analysis shows that a larger Koenigsberger ratio is beneficial to extract more reliable remanence and susceptibility information.