HR: 0800h
AN: S41A-02 [Abstracts]
TI: Crustal Structure of the Pakistan Himalayas from Ambient Noise and Seismic Rayleigh Wave Inversion
AU: * Li, A
EM: ali2@uh.edu
AF: University of Houston, 4800 Calhoun Rd, Houston, TX 77204, United States
AB:
The western Himalayan syntaxi is a unique feature resulted from the India-Asia collision and its formation
remains poorly understood. To image crustal structure in the western syntaxi, we analyze Rayleigh waves from
ambient seismic noise and earthquake data recorded during the Pakistan Broadband Seismic Experiment. The
Pakistan experiment included 9 broadband stations with an aperture of ~200 km and operated from
September to December in 1992. We compute cross-correlations of ambient noise data on an hourly base and
stack all the cross-correlations for 70 days to produce the estimated Green functions. Power spectrum analysis
shows that the dominant energy is from 0.15 to 0.25 Hz and from 0.05 to 0.07 Hz, consistent with the well-know
background seismic noise. A phase with large amplitude appears at near zero time on almost all stacked cross-
correlations and its origin is not clear to us at this moment. Rayleigh waves can be clearly observed for station
pairs at the distance of 80 km and larger but are contaminated by the near zero time phase at shorter station
spacing. Rayleigh wave phase velocities at periods of 4 to 15 s will be produced from the ambient noise data.
Using regional and teleseismic earthquakes, we expect to obtain Rayleigh wave dispersions at periods from 15
to 50 s. The phase velocities from both datasets will be inverted for crustal thickness and shear-wave structure
beneath the Pakistan Himalayas.
DE: 7205 Continental crust (1219)
DE: 7255 Surface waves and free oscillations
DE: 8015 Local crustal structure
DE: 8104 Continental margins: convergent
SC: Seismology [S]
MN: 2007 Joint Assembly