Discovery of a surface wave velocity anomaly in the West Sea of South Korea

Abstract

Imaging of Rayleigh- and Love-wave velocities is very important in detecting geophysical anomalies within the earth. Surface wave velocity imaging studies using ambient noise have provided enhanced and detailed images of velocity anomalies for sedimentary basins, hotspots, and volcanoes in various regions of the Earth (Yang et al., 2008). Cross-correlations of ambient noises observed from the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA) seismic network provide the short-period Rayleigh-and Love-wave dispersion characteristics of the Korean Peninsula (Cho et al., 2007). Signal whitening and multiple-filter analysis are used to equalise power in signals from different times before noise processing, such as cross-correlation and stacking to extract group velocities from the estimated Green’s functions, which are then used to image the spatially varying dispersion at periods between 1 and 5 s. The analysis method and data used in this paper are the same as those of Cho et al. (2007) except for the addition of the dataset of a new station, HUK. However, this paper notes that Rayleigh- and Love-wave velocity images in short periods show a very different group velocity image for the north-eastern area of the HUK station because additional data was analysed. This velocity anomaly corresponds with the residual anomaly of gravity tomography obtained in prior studies (Yu and Min, 2005; Kim and Oh, 2007). Our results show that a fracture zone concerning the Permo-Triassic collision (Choi et al., 2006; Kwon et al., 2009) exists below the north-eastern sea of the HUK station. In addition, recent studies (de Ridder and Dellinger, 2011; de Ridder and Biondi, 2013; Mordret et al., 2011, 2013a, 2013b, 2013c; Bussat and Kugler, 2011) regarding ambient noise tomography in hydro-carbon fields show that the anomaly might have resulted from the hydro-carbon reservoir. In the near future, the ambient noise tomography (ANT) method can replace seismic survey dominantly using body waves to find oil and gas reservoirs.