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Overpressure and buoyant effect of underlying sediments are generally used to account for the upward motion or formation of submarine mud volcanoes and mud diapirs. In this study, we process and interpret the gravity anomalies associated with the active mud diapirs off SW Taiwan. Geologically, the mud diapirs are just formed and are still very active, thus we can better understand the initial process of the mud diapirs formation through the gravity analysis. Our results show that the density contrasts of the submarine mud diapirs with respect to the surroundings are generally positive. Because the study area is in a tectonically compressive regime and the gas plume venting from the submarine mud volcanoes is very active, we thus infer that mechanically the mud diapirs off SW Taiwan have been formed mainly due to the tectonic compression on the underlying sediments of high pore-fluid pressure, instead of the buoyancy of the buried sediments. The overpressured sediments and fluid are compressed and pushed upwards to pierce the overlying sediments and form the more compacted mud diapirs. The relatively denser material of the mud diapirs probably constrains the flowing courses of the submarine canyons off SW Taiwan, especially for the upper reaches of the Kaoping and Fangliao submarine canyons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To study the Holocene paleomagnetic field in Taiwan area, we performed a series of magnetic experiments to a marine sediment core OR1-715-21 obtained from the offshore of eastern Taiwan during the OR1-715 cruise. Analyzed magnetic properties show that the remanent magnetization carriers of the core are uniformly dominated by single-domain and pseudo-single-domain magnetite, revealing a suitable material for relative paleointensity (RPI) estimation. The stable and well defined characteristic remanent magnetization (ChRM) provides the reliable determination of the inclination and declination. Dipole moments were further calculated by using the RPI and inclination data. The variation of the dipole moments compares well to the CALS10k.1b model (a continuous model of archaeomagnetic and lake sediment data for the past 10000 years), implying the dominance of the dipole field in Taiwan area. Though the real declination is unavailable because of lacking core orientation during coring, we could correct the values based on some critical conditions. If the paleosecular variation (PSV) is considered, the virtual geomagnetic pole (VGP) is generally suggested to vary between 80°N and 90°N instead of coinciding with the geography North Pole. To fit the condition considering the PSV effect, the ChRM declination had to be rotated 180° to get the corrected declination. As a result, variation patterns of the paleo-inclination, -declination, and paleointensity could be suitably determined in the study. Outcomes of these analyses reveal that the paleomagnetic field in Taiwan region should be dominantly driven from the dipole field under the PSV effect for the last 7500 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Poisson theorem provides a simple relationship between the gravity and magnetic potentials, which is useful in interpreting joint data sets of gravity and magnetic data. Based on the simple Poisson theorem, magnetization/density ratio (MDR) can be estimated. However, potential field data is often ambiguous in datum level and multisources interference that may cause bias in interpretation. Here, we propose an improved Poisson theorem to estimate MDR by using analytic signals of gravity and magnetic data. The major advantage of using the analytic signal is that we can also determine the sources locations and boundaries supposing that we know the ambient magnetic parameters. Besides, we can also avoid the determination error from uncertain datum levels. We demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method in 2-D and 3-D synthetic models. The proposed method is also applied to a profile across the offshore area of northern Taiwan. Comparing with the reflection seismic profile, our result can help identify the existence of a deep-seated igneous body beneath the area of Mienhuayu and Pengchiagu islands off northern Taiwan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]