Nonlinear teleseismic tomography at Long Valley caldera, using three-dimensional minimum travel time ray tracing
- Univ. of California, Santa Barbara, CA (United States)
- Los Alamos National Lab., NM (United States)
- Geological Survey, Menlo Park, CA (United States); and others
The authors explore the impact of three-dimensional minimum travel time ray tracing on nonlinear teleseismic inversion. This problem has particular significance when trying to image strongly contrasting low-velocity bodies, such as magma chambers, because strongly refracted/and/or diffracted rays may precede the direct P wave arrival traditionally used in straight-ray seismic tomography. They use a simplex-based ray tracer to compute the three-dimensional, minimum travel time ray paths and employ an interative technique to cope with nonlinearity. Results from synthetic data show that their algorithm results in better model reconstructions compared with traditional straight-ray inversions. The authors reexamine the teleseismic data collected at Long Valley caldera by the U.S. Geological Survey. The most prominent feature of their result is a 25-30% low-velocity zone centered at 11.5 km depth beneath the northwestern quandrant of the caldera. Beneath this at a depth of 24.5 km is a more diffuse 15% low-velocity zone. In general, the low velocities tend to deepen to the south and east. The authors interpret the shallow feature to be the residual Long Valley caldera magma chamber, while the deeper feature may represent basaltic magmas ponded in the midcrust. The deeper position of the prominent low-velocity region in comparison to earlier tomographic images is a result of using three-dimensional rays rather than straight rays in the ray tracing. The magnitude of the low-velocity anomaly is a factor of {approximately}3 times larger than earlier models from linear arrival time inversions and is consistent with models based on observations of ray bending at sites within the caldera. These results imply the presence of anywhere from 7 to 100% partial melt beneath the caldera. 40 refs., 1 fig., 1 tab.
- OSTI ID:
- 245088
- Journal Information:
- Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol. 100, Issue B10; Other Information: PBD: 10 Oct 1995
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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