On the resolving power of tomographic images in the Aegean area

Abstract

b The imaging of upper mantle heterogeneity by seismic tomography is strongly limited by the uneven global distribution both of seismic recording stations and earthquake sources. This can result in a loss of resolution and significance in the final image, particularly when a sparse data set contains few ray paths which intersect at sufficiently high angles in the volume of interest. In order to investigate the theoretical resolving power of a previously published tomographic image of the Aegean area, synthetic tests of the inversion procedure using a ray-path matrix obtained in this previous study for local and teleseismic P-waves were carried out. The aim was to examine the extent to which the shape of a synthetic lithospheric slab penetrating to different depths is inherently distorted by the tomographic imaging procedure, and to compare the synthetic tomographic images with the results from the actual inversion. The distortion is found to take the form of an artificial stretching of the lithospheric slab. The maximum ‘stretching factor', as indicated by the downdip displacement of the peak amplitude of the synthetic high-velocity anomaly, is found to be a factor of 2 or so, though the distortion is usually less than this. The peak amplitude of the tomographic image of a lithospheric slab is found from the inversion of traveltime data to be at depths at or below 400 km. This indicates that the high-velocity lithospheric slab in the Aegean penetrates deeper than the Benioff zone seismicity of about 200 km. However, no constraints of the maximum depth of penetration could be established with the data set used in the present work.