Determination of two-dimensional velocity structure of Benioff zone based on inversion of body wave travel time (Case study of central Kamchatka)

Abstract

A 2D variant of the inversion method for determining velocities within the Benioff zone of Kamchatka is developed with respect to the time of seismic wave travel from the foci group to Shipunskii station located in the region where the zone outcrops at the ocean bottom. The method is based on the idea of seismic tomography on the relationship between travel time discrepancies along the focus–station path and the value of seismic slowness, which is inverse to the velocity and corresponds to the gradient of the time field or the derivative of a hodograph with respect to the distance dt/dl. From this viewpoint, the field of discrepancies observed is the difference between the experimental and theoretical values of slowness. Its averaging with respect to depth and epicentral distance in 50 × 50 km rectangular windows and subsequent inversion make it possible to obtain a discrete velocity field using the GoldenSoftware Surfer program. Resmoothing with the same software leads to a variant of continuous velocity distribution = in the axial plane of the Benioff zone. The described procedure was used to calculate the velocities in this zone of the southern Kuril Islands and southern and central Kamchatka. The principal result in the latter case is identification of a sharp jump in the velocities of body waves in the upper mantle (up to 1.3 km/s for P-waves and up to 0.8 km/s for S-waves) beneath the Kronotskii Peninsula in the 7 years before the catastrophic Kronotskii earthquake that occurred in 1997 (M = 7.9) with an upthrow focal mechanism. This jump reflects the concentration of stresses in the epicentral zone of the earthquake. This result is important for medium-term forecasting of strong earthquakes.