Integration of seismic, MT and gravity data in a thrust belt interpretation

One of the main problems in geophysics is how to produce a consistent and reliable model of a given geophysical/geological system, integrating independent data sets with different physical meaning, acquisition scale, resolution power, quality and so on. This situation is frequent in the thrust belt environment, especially when the quality of near vertical reflection seismic data is low: in this case many efforts are made to apply alternative geophysical tools, such as wide angle seismic, magnetotelluric and gravity methods. In this paper we present a possible approach to managing the integration of many data sets to produce a final consistent geophysical model. The real-life case of an exploration survey performed in Southern Italy, in the Southern Apennines, is considered as an example of the approach. This is presented as a series of sequential steps giving a corresponding series of 'partial models' converging into a final geophysical model, but it is much more appropriate to consider the methodology as a circular and iterative process, which is more consistent with an approach to a complex domain.