Local-Scale Ambient Noise Tomography In and Around the Naruko Volcano, NE Japan

Abstract:

The 2008 Iwate-Miyagi Nairiku earthquake (M7.2) occurred along a fault in northeastern Japan. The focal area is surrounded with four quaternary volcanoes: Yakeishi, Kurikoma, Onikobe caldera, and Naruko volcano. In a previous study of Okada et al. (2014), they conducted seismic tomography in and around the focal area, and found low velocity zones (LVZ) with high Vp/Vs beneath the volcanoes. They suggest that those LVZs could correspond to areas with over-pressurized fluids, which promoted the occurrence of the earthquake. One of their remaining issues in their study, however, is that a possible LVZ was not clearly found beneath the Naruko volcano, which is located on the south edge of aftershock distribution. In this study, we performed ambient noise tomography in an attempt to identify the possible LVZ beneath Naruko using seismic stations, which are densely deployed in the Naruko volcanic area. After the pre-processing (Bensen et al. 2007) to obtain Rayleigh-wave Green’s function, we measure phase velocity dispersion curves as described in Lin et al. (2008). Then, surface-wave tomography (Barmin et al. 2001) is performed from 0.15 Hz to 0.5 Hz with a frequency step of 0.05 Hz. As a final step, we invert phase velocities for a 1-D Vs model at each grid point by nonlinear inversion(Tarantola and Valette, 1982). The Vs structure shows two LVZs beneath Naruko and Onikobe. The LVZ of Naruko, however, is merged into that of Onikobe at around 4 km depths and is not resolved in deeper crust.