Preliminary Shear Velocity Tomography of Mt St Helens, Washington from iMUSH Array

Abstract:

The imaging Magma Under Mount St Helens (iMUSH) experiment will illuminate the crust beneath Mt St Helens volcano. The ambient noise tomography (ANT) component of this experiment measures shear velocity structure, which is more sensitive than P velocity to the presence of melt and other pore fluids. Seventy passive-source broadband seismometers for iMUSH were deployed in the summer of 2014 in a dense array of 100 Km diameter with a 10 km station spacing. We cross correlated ambient noise in 120 s windows and summed the result over many months for pairs of stations. Then frequency-domain methods on these cross correlations are employed to measure the phase velocities (Ekström et al. Geophys Rev Lett, 2009). Unlike velocities attained by group velocity methods, velocities for path lengths as small as one wavelength can be measured, enabling analysis of higher frequency signals and increasing spatial resolution. The minimum station spacing from which signals can be recovered ranges from 12 km at 0.18 Hz, a frequency that dominantly samples the upper crust to 20 km, to 37 km at 0.04 Hz, a frequency sensitive to structure through the crust and uppermost mantle, with lower spacing at higher frequencies. These phase velocities are tomographically inverted to obtain shear velocity maps for each frequency, assuming ray theory. Initial shear velocity maps for frequencies between 0.04-0.18 Hz reveal low-velocity sediments in the Puget Lowland west of Mount St Helens at 0.16-0.18 Hz, and a low velocity zone near 0.10 Hz between Mt Rainier and Mt Adams, east of Mount St Helens. The latter may reflect large-scale crustal plumbing of the arc between volcanic centers. In subsequent analyses these ANT results will be jointly inverted with receiver functions in order to further resolve crustal and upper mantle structure.