Marlim R3D phase 3: The marine magnetotelluric regional model and associated data set

Abstract

Synthetic data provided by earth models are essential to investigate several geologic problems. Marlim R3D (MR3D) is an open-source realistic earth modeling project for electromagnetic simulations of the postsalt reservoirs of the Brazilian offshore margin. In phase 3, we have conducted a 3D marine magnetotelluric (MMT) study with the finite-difference method to generate the synthetic magnetotelluric (MT) data set for the MR3D earth model. To that end, we upscaled the original controlled-source electromagnetic model to preserve all local-scale features, such as the thin-layer turbidite reservoirs, and to include several geologic regional features, such as the coastline, land topography, basement rocks representing the continental crust, and mantle rocks. Then, we simulated an MMT survey with 500 receivers evenly spaced at 1 km intervals along the rugged seafloor of the MR3D model. To accurately represent the MMT model with a 329 × 329 × 200 km volume, we have produced a mesh with 161 × 136 × 242 cells (approximately 5.3 million cells). We computed the full MT and tipper tensor at 25 periods in the time range of 1–10,000 s. The data set, the model, and companion material are freely distributed for research or commercial use under the Creative Commons License at the Zenodo platform.