Attenuation of crustal waves across the Alpine Range

Abstract

We present observational evidence of an anomalous propagation of Lg waves across the south‐western part of the Alpine range, and we use numerical simulations to model these observations. We consider a set of 48 earthquakes which occurred in Switzerland, northern Italy, and southeastern France and were recorded by the French (Laboratoire de Detection et de Geophysique) and northwest Italian (Istituto Geofisico di Genova) seismic networks. While the amplitude of the Pn phase is stable throughout the region studied, Lg wave amplitude undergoes strong variations. We map this anomaly in Lg wave propagation by dividing the region into a grid and attributing to each cell a value equal to the mean value of the Lg/Pn amplitude ratios computed for all the paths which cross this cell. The image obtained shows that the extinction of Lg waves occurs in a limited region of the western Alps which corresponds to the zone of highest positive Bouguer anomaly. This zone located to the east of the high peaks of the Massifs Cristallins Externes does not correspond either to the region of the highest topographies or to the one of the deepest Moho. At a frequency of 2 Hz, the crustal waves that cross this anomalous region have amplitudes divided by more than 10 with respect to waves that propagate along other paths. In order to investigate the cause of the anomaly we perform numerical simulations of SH wave propagation through a model of the western Alps which includes the main characteristics of the geological structure. Our results indicate that the geometrical effect of the lateral variations of the medium does not account entirely for the actual vanishing of crustal waves. The simulation predicts a decay of the amplitude by only a factor between 2 and 3. The introduction of corrugation in the interface shapes further adds to the decay. However, other sources of attenuation such as anelasticity or severe heterogeneity must be invoked to explain fully the observations.