Simultaneous Local and Teleseismic P-Wave Velocity Tomography in Western Mexico

Abstract:

In western Mexico, the subduction of the Rivera and Cocos plates beneath the North America plate has deformed and fragmented the overriding plate, forming several structural rifts and crustal blocks. To improve the current tomographic images of the continental crust and uppermost mantle in this complex area, we used P-wave arrivals of local and teleseismic earthquakes along with the Fast Marching Method tomography technique. Our traveltime datasets include 2100 local earthquakes P-wave arrival times and 5,062 P-wave relative arrival time residuals of teleseismic earthquakes. The local earthquake phase picking was manually corrected and the relative arrival time residuals were estimated using the Multi-Channel Cross-Correlation method. All earthquakes occurred between 2006 and 2007 and were recorded by seismic stations deployed during the Mapping the Rivera Subduction Zone (MARS) experiment. The temporal seismic network consisted of 50 stations equipped with Streckeisen STS-2 and Quanterra Q330. We use an iterative nonlinear tomographic procedure and the fast marching method to map the residual patterns as P wave velocity anomalies. We followed an inversion scheme consisting of: (1) selection of a local and teleseismic earthquake, (2) estimation of improved 1-D reference velocity model, and (3) checkerboard testing to determine the optimum configuration of the velocity nodes, and inversion parameters, finally (4) perform final tomography and results analysis.