Abruzzi region (central Italy) producing vast damage in the L'Aquila town and surroundings. In this paper we present the location and geometry of the fault system as obtained by the analysis of main shock and aftershocks recorded by permanent and temporary networks. The distribution of aftershocks, 712 selected events with M L ! 2.3 and 20 with M L ! 4.0, defines a complex, 40 km long, NW trending extensional structure. The main shock fault segment extends for 15-18 km and dips at 45°to the SW, between 10 and 2 km depth. The extent of aftershocks coincides with the surface trace of the Paganica fault, a poorly known normal fault that, after the event, has been quoted to accommodate the extension of the area. We observe a migration of seismicity to the north on an echelon fault that can rupture in future large earthquakes.
S U M M A R YAn application of full-waveform tomography to dense onshore wide-aperture seismic data recorded in a complex geological setting (thrust belt) is presented.The waveform modelling and tomography are implemented in the frequency domain. The modelling part is solved with a finite-difference method applied to the visco-acoustic wave equation. The inversion is based on a local gradient method. Only the P-wave velocity is involved in the inversion. The inversion is applied iteratively to discrete frequency components by proceeding from low to high frequencies. This defines a multiscale imaging in the sense that high wavenumbers are progressively incorporated in images. The linearized waveform tomography requires an accurate starting velocity model that has been developed by firstarrival traveltime tomography.After specific pre-processing of the data, 16 frequency components ranging between 5.4 and 20 Hz were inverted. Ten iterations were computed per frequency component leading to 160 tomographic models. The waveform tomography has successfully imaged southwestdipping structures previously identified from other geophysical data as being associated with high-resistivity bodies. The relevance of the tomographic images is locally demonstrated by comparison of a velocity-depth function extracted from the waveform tomography models with a coincident vertical seismic profiling (VSP) log available on the profile. Moreover, comparison between observed and synthetic seismograms computed in the (starting) traveltime and waveform tomography models demonstrates unambiguously that the waveform tomography successfully predicts for wide-angle reflections from southwest-dipping geological structures.This study demonstrates that the combination of first-arrival traveltime and frequencydomain full-waveform tomographies applied to dense wide-aperture seismic data is a promising approach to quantitative imaging of complex geological structures. Indeed, wide-aperture acquisition geometries offer the opportunity to develop an accurate background velocity model for the subsequent waveform tomography. This is critical, because the building of the macromodel remains an open question when only near-vertical reflection data are considered.Key words: finite-difference methods, thrust belt, traveltime and full waveform inversions, wide-aperture seismic data. I N T RO D U C T I O NSeismic imaging of complex structures characterized by strong lateral variations in the velocity field remains a challenge. Usually, the seismic imaging problem is applied to conventional surface-seismic multichannel reflection geometries which involve only near-vertical wave propagations (namely, short-angle reflections). In such geometries, the seismic imaging problem can be subdivided into two distinct tasks. Chronologically, the first one is the determination of a smooth background velocity model which describes the large-scale velocity distribution. This macromodel building is generally developed by traveltime tomography or migration-based velocity analys...
We present the first high-quality catalog of early aftershocks of the three mainshocks of the 2016 central Italy Amatrice-Visso-Norcia normal faulting sequence. We located 10,574 manually picked aftershocks with a robust probabilistic, non-linear method achieving a significant improvement in the solution accuracy and magnitude completeness with respect to previous studies. Aftershock distribution and relocated mainshocks give insight into the complex architecture of major causative and subsidiary faults, thus providing crucial constraints on multi-segment rupture models. We document reactivation and kinematic inversion of a WNW-dipping listric structure, referable to the inherited Mts Sibillini Thrust (MST) that controlled segmentation of the causative normal faults. Spatial partitioning of aftershocks evidences that the MST lateral ramp had a dual control on rupture propagation, behaving as a barrier for the Amatrice and Visso mainshocks, and later as an asperity for the Norcia mainshock. We hypothesize that the Visso mainshock re-activated also the deep part of an optimally oriented preexisting thrust. Aftershock patterns reveal that the Amatrice Mw5.4 aftershock and the Norcia mainshock ruptured two distinct antithetic faults 3–4 km apart. Therefore, our results suggest to consider both the MST cross structure and the subsidiary antithetic fault in the finite-fault source modelling of the Norcia earthquake.
S U M M A R YThe NW-SE trending Val d'Agri extensional basin is one of the regions in Italy with the highest seismogenic potential. Field data do not univocally define which of the fault systems bordering the basin on the two opposite sides is accommodating the active deformation. In this study, we detect and locate, by using an automatic picking procedure, almost 2000 low-magnitude earthquakes (−0.2 < M L < 2.7) recorded by a dense network during a 13-months-long seismic experiment. Events are mostly located along the southwestern flank of the basin. To the south, intense swarm-type microseismicity defines a major cluster ∼5 km wide from 1 to 5 km depth. To the west, a clear alignment of events, characterized by normal faulting kinematics, defines a NE-dipping normal fault between 1 and 6 km depth. The upward continuation of this structure, ∼5 km long, matches a mapped active normal fault recognized by field and palaeoseismological surveys.A temporal correlation found between the intense swarm-type microseismicity and the water level changes in the nearby artificial Pertusillo lake suggests that this seismicity is reservoir-induced.
A B S T R A C TAn integrated multiscale seismic imaging flow is applied to dense onshore wideaperture seismic data recorded in a complex geological setting (thrust belt).An initial P-wave velocity macromodel is first developed by first-arrival traveltime tomography. This model is used as an initial guess for subsequent full-waveform tomography, which leads to greatly improved spatial resolution of the P-wave velocity model. However, the application of full-waveform tomography to the high-frequency part of the source bandwidth is difficult, due to the non-linearity of this kind of method. Moreover, it is computationally expensive at high frequencies since a finitedifference method is used to model the wave propagation. Hence, full-waveform tomography was complemented by asymptotic prestack depth migration to process the full-source bandwidth and develop a sharp image of the short wavelengths. The final traveltime tomography model and two smoothed versions of the final full-waveform tomography model were used as a macromodel for the prestack depth migration.In this study, wide-aperture multifold seismic data are used. After specific preprocessing of the data, 16 frequency components ranging from 5.4 Hz to 20 Hz were inverted in cascade by the full-waveform tomography algorithm. The full-waveform tomography successfully imaged SW-dipping structures previously identified as highresistivity bodies. The relevance of the full-waveform tomography models is demonstrated locally by comparison with a coincident vertical seismic profiling (VSP) log available on the profile. The prestack depth-migrated images, inferred from the traveltime, and the smoothed full-waveform tomography macromodels are shown to be, on the whole, consistent with the final full-waveform tomography model. A more detailed analysis, based on common-image gather computations, and local comparison with the VSP log revealed that the most accurate migrated sections are those obtained from the full-waveform tomography macromodels. A resolution analysis suggests that the asymptotic prestack depth migration successfully migrated the wideaperture components of the data, allowing medium wavelengths in addition to the short wavelengths of the structure to be imaged.
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