Advances in Earthquake Location and Tomography

1. Advances in Earthquake LocationandTomography William Menke Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory Columbia University

2. Waves from earthquake first arrived in Palisades NY at 15:00:32 on Sept 10, 2006

3. that was the recent Gulf of Mexico earthquake,by the way …

4. Locating an earthquakerequires knowing the“seismic velocity structure*”of the earthaccurately*the scalar fields Vp(x) and Vs(x)(which are strongly correlated)

5. Arrival Time ≠Travel TimeQ: a car arrived in town after traveling for an half an hour at sixty miles an hour. Where did it start?A. Thirty miles awayQ: a car arrived in town at half past one, traveling at sixty miles an hour. Where did it start?A. Are you crazy?

6. Big Issue:Representing 3 dimensional structure What’s the best way? compatibility with data sources ease of visualization and editing embodies prior knowledge e.g. geological layers facilitating calculation

7. Overall organization into interfaces Small-scale organization into tetrahedra Linear interpolation within tetrahedra implying rays that are circular arcs

9. Thickness of Earth’s Crust

10. Compressional Velocity just below Crust Overall model has 1.3106 tetrahedra

11. Variations in Traveltime due to 3D earth structure seismometer earthquake

12. Location Errors: = 0.5 degree = 55 km = 30 miles

13. Geometrical Ideas What are the important characteristics of arrival time data that allow earthquakes to be located ? (Careful thinking is more important than furious scribbling of formula … )

15. Suppose you contour arrival timeon surface of earth Earthquake’s (x,y) is center of bullseye but what about its depth?

16. Earthquake’s depth related to curvature of arrival time at origin Deep Shallow

18. Earthquakes in Long Valley Caldera, California located with absolute traveltimes Courtesty of Felix Walhhauser, LDEO

19. Earthquakes in Long Valley Caldera, California located with differential traveltimes Courtesty of Felix Walhhauser, LDEO

20. How does differential arrival time vary spatially? Depends strongly on this angle

21. In a 3 dimensional homogeneous box … maximum minimum mean If you can identify the line AB, then you can locate earthquakes

22. as long as you have more than two earthquakes

23. In a vertically-stratified earth, rays are bent back up to the surface, so both Points A and B are on the surface. ray wavefront The pattern of differnetial traveltime is more complicated …

24. The same idea works … p q

25. differential arrival time = difference in arrival times

26. 1)

27. 2) Use cross-correlation to measure differential arrival times Very accurate DT’s !

28. Issue: Statistical Correlations in Data DTpqi = Tpi – Tqi DTrqi = Tri – Tqi Then even if errors in T’s uncorrelated, errors in DT’s will be strongly correlate. Covariance/variance=1/2 Furthermore, relationships exist between different data DTpqi = DTpri – DTqri

29. Issue: How does the statistics of cross-correlation enter in to the problem? Monte-Carlo simulations: Differential arrival times as calculated by cross-correlation are less correlated than implied by the formula covariance:variance = 1/2 simulation formula

30. What is the practical advantageof using differential arrival timesto locate earthquakes My approach is to examine the statistics of location errors using numerical simulations Compare the result of using absolute arrival time data And differential arrival time data When the data are noise Or the earth structure is poorly known

31. Geometry of the numerical experiment …

32. Effect of noisy data (10 milliseconds of measurement error) differential data differential data absolute data absolute data

33. Effect of near surface heterogeneities (1 km/s of velocity variation with a scale length of 5 km) differential data absolute data differential data absolute data

34. Both absolute locations and relative locations of earthquakes are improved by using differential arrival time data when arrival times are nosily measured and when near-surface earth structure is poorly modeled Relative location errors can be just a few meters even when errors are “realistically large”

38. Tomography: Use To reconstruct

39. simultaneous earthquake location and tomography? Many earthquakes with unknown X, Y, Z, To Unknown velocity structure Solve for everything Using either absolute arrival times or differential arrival times

40. A numerical test 11 stations 50 earthquakes on fault zone Heterogeneity near fault zone only

41. True earthquake locations And fault zone heterogenity ( 1 km/s) Reconstructed earthquake locations And fault zone heterogenity, using noise free differential data Seems to work !

42. Reality Check: How big is the Signal? How much better are the data fit? When the earth structure is allowed to vary compared with using a simple, layered earth structure and keeping it fixed? Answer: 0.7 milliseconds, for a dataset that has traveltimes of a few seconds Need very precise measurements!

43. What are the other key issues in Joint Tomography/Earthquake Location Study a simplified version of the problem In depth analysis of the special case of unknown origin time but known location

49. Cautionary Tale ….. Don’t assume that something is unimportant, just because you’ve eliminated it from the problem ! Since you solve for m first, and use infer x with the formula Then if there is more than one m that solves the problem, there is more than one x, too. So we must address the issue of whether the solution for m is unique.