Analysis of Regional and Residual Gravity Disturbance of Major Fault Belts in the Tarim Basin, Western China

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Reviewer’s Report on the manuscript entitled:

Analysis of regional and residual gravity disturbance of major fault belts in the Tarim Basin, Western China

The authors estimated the residual Bouguer gravity disturbance of the Tarim Basin using the minimum curvature method and analyzed gravitational characteristics in the major fault belts of the Tarim Basin. Though the topic and results are interesting the presentation and grammar must be improved. I noticed many grammar issues. Furthermore, the length of the manuscript is too short for an article type. Authors can either try to add 4-5 more pages by adding more literature review to the introduction and more paragraphs to the discussion section. Alternatively (not recommended), they can change the type of the manuscript from “Article” to “Technical Note”.

 

The introduction needs further improvement. It should also contain other techniques for gravity anomaly separation and analysis. For example, wavelet and spectral analyses have been used successfully for regional gravity analysis and anomaly separation. The articles that I suggest looking at and add in the introduction are:

https://doi.org/10.1088/1742-2132/6/3/007

https://doi.org/10.1007/s00190-018-1156-9

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jappgeo.2012.12.009

 

Line 19. EIGEN-6C4 needs to be defined first in the abstract. Please ensure that all the acronyms in the manuscript are defined the first time they are used.

Line 21. Please removed “showed”

Line 24. Please replace “relationship with” with “related to”

Line 26. Start a new sentence. Say “This suggests that the depth …”

Line 54-60 By referring to the section numbers, please also discuss how the rest of the manuscript is organized.

 

The figure resolutions should be improved. Figure 2, please increase the font size of the texts and numbers. Lines 121-134 can go to the Method section. Please also describe in more details the methods applied in this research. Please also show a flow chart of processes used in this research, so the readers can easily understand.

 

Line 119. Before the result section, you need to add another subsection 2.3 Methods

 

Line 348. Please replace “can’t” with “cannot”.

 

In the conclusion section, please also mention the limitations of the study.

Please see the MDPI guidelines for how to refer to a citation in the text and check all the references for their correctness and format. 

Thank you

Regards,

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

 

1.      It can be seen that the authors made great efforts on correcting the paper according to reviewers' comments. As a result, the paper has been improved.

2.       The paper analyzes regional and residual gravity disturbance to reflect the subsurface geo-information in the great Tarim Basin. The method is useful and has good practical significance.

3.       While the paper provides good interpretations on the gravity disturbance, the validation of the interpretations is relatively weak (e.g., some references are used). It is recommended for the authors to provide more specific and detailed reference information to validate the findings from the gravity disturbance (i.e., correctness and accuracy)

4.       There are still many grammatical errors in the paper. For example, in Line 80, the period at the end of the sentence is missing; Line 345, "into two part" should be "two parts"; articles "a" and "the" are missing or wrongly used in many places in the paper. It is recommended for the authors to carefully proofread the paper before the next submission.

5.      Lines 24-27, the sentence is not clear and has several grammatical errors, please rewrite it.

6.      Line 141, is NEE same as NNE? Line 151, is NWW same as NNW? NNE and NNW are typically used. Please double check them.

7.      Because "gravity anomaly" is used by most people, the authors should explain why "disturbance" is used instead of "anomaly".

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

I would like to thank the authors for addressing my comments. In my view, the manuscript can be accepted.

One quick note. Line 197. Please define ENE. Note that all the abbreviations must be defined.

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.