Determination of reactivated regions and faults in the Iraq Southern Desert with the new edge technique, Inverse Tilt Angle of Second-gradients (ITAS)

A well-known and essential task in magnetic data interpretation is the structural mapping of basement terranes. Useful tools for analyzing the deep basement are edge-detection filters that normalize the first-/second-order gradients of the magnetic field in three spatial directions. Different edge-detection filters can reveal different structures; for example, filters that normally involve higher-order gradients may detect small-scale magnetic sources. This study aims to define magnetic bodies and interpret intra-basement structures from aeromagnetic data. For this purpose, we utilize three commonly used edge-detection filters that show edges as peaks, which can sometimes be quite broad. In addition, we suggest a new high-resolution filter that shows edges as a sharp crossover. The filters have been tested on the Bishop magnetic model and real airborne magnetic data from the Iraq Southern Desert (SD). Comparing the products of the proposed crossover filter with the three common filters shows similar high-resolution products, but the new filter can often highlight both shallow and deep subtle basement fabric. Our study of the SD magnetic dataset defined older reactivated regions, structural elements, and the trends of intrabasement fractures associated with more recent seismic events.