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Thesis. 1976. Ph.D.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Earth and Planetary Sciences. / Microfiche copy available in Archives and Science. / Bibliography: leaves 174-183. / Ph.D.

Thesis. 1978. Ph.D.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Earth and Planetary Sciences. / Microfiche copy available in Archives and Science. / Vita. / Bibliography : leaves 263-277. / Ph.D.

Thesis. 1978. Ph.D.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Earth and Planetary Science. / Microfiche copy available in Archives and Science. / Vita. / Bibliography: leaves 313-331. / Ph.D.

Over 700 km of industry seismic reflection data in the central Appalachians were reprocessed using both conventional and newly developed processing schemes. A new processing sequence, called dip projection, is introduced. The technique projects crooked-line processed CMPs onto a straight line oriented in the general dip direction for the area. The new stacked sections more closely approximate a dip line and hence are more migration-friendly and interpretable than the crooked-line stacks. Methods of determining the lateral continuity of subsurface density contrasts were also applied to gravity data from the study area. Known collectively as potential field attributes, the analytic signal, the tilt angle, and the gradient of the tilt angle (the potential field wavenumber ) proved valuable in the analysis of the gravity data. Comparison of reflection seismic data from the southern and central Appalachians revealed a dichotomy of seismic reflectivity from east to west. A highly reflective crust beneath the Piedmont in both the central and southern Appalachians contrasts with a general lack of reflectivity beneath the Blue Ridge and Valley and Ridge provinces where coherent reflections are restricted to the upper 3-4 seconds of the data. This difference in reflectivity is interpreted as a fundamental difference in the location and orientation of preexisting zones of weakness between the different crustal regions with respect to the tectonic events affecting the Appalachians since the early Paleozoic. The combination of the results of new methods of seismic and potential fields processing with deep well and geologic information allowed the lateral continuity of two major structures in the central Appalachians to be examined. The Blue Ridge in Virginia was found to overly a duplex of Cambrian-Ordovician carbonates formed in response to stresses during the Alleghanian Orogeny. A large thrust sheet of similar carbonate rocks was interpreted beneath the Nittany Anticlinorium in West Virginia. To the south in Virginia, this thrust sheet is replaced by imbrication of the carbonate package. The change in structural style may be related to the existence of a lateral ramp or it may reflect the overall change in structural style from the central to southern Appalachians. / Ph. D.

Virtual source gathers were generated using the principles of seismic interferometry from 135 hours of ambient noise recorded during a controlled-source survey across the Salton Sea Geothermal Field in southern California. The non-uniform nature of the noise sources violated a primary assumption of the method and generated artifacts in the data. The artifacts generated by the high-energy impulsive sources (e.g. earthquakes, shots) were removable using traditional methods of amplitude normalization prior to cross-correlation. The continuous source artifacts generated by the geothermal wells and highways required an unconventional approach of utilizing only normalized impulsive sources to successfully reduce the artifacts. Virtual source gathers were produced successfully that contained strong surface waves at 0.4-2.5 Hz, an order of magnitude below the corner frequency of the geophones, and modest body waves at 22-30 Hz, which are generally more difficult to obtain due to the need for many large, well-distributed subsurface sources. The virtual source gathers compare well to nearby explosive shots and are more densely spaced, but have a much lower signal-to-noise ratio. Analysis of the surface waves was complicated by strong higher-order modes. Spectral analysis of virtual source gathers required utilization of the geothermal plant energy, which produced usable signal at offsets required for mode separation. The virtual source dispersion curve compared well to a dispersion curve from a nearby explosive shot. P-waves were observed on the virtual source gathers. Creation of a low-quality multichannel reflection stack revealed two weak reflectors in the upper 2 km. / Master of Science

<p dir="ltr">Studying changes in seismic velocities beneath two separate volcanic systems in the Aleutian arc. Focusing on eruptive behavior, this research delineates subsurface changes through the lens of changes in seismic velocity.</p>

Rapid and robust characterization of large earthquakes in terms of their spatial extent and temporal duration is of high importance for disaster mitigation and early warning applications. Backtracking of seismic P-waves was successfully used by several authors to image the rupture process of the great Sumatra earthquake (26.12.2004) using short period and broadband arrays. We follow here an approach of Walker et al. to backtrack and stack broadband waveforms from global network stations using traveltimes for a global Earth model to obtain the overall spatio-temporal development of the energy radiation of large earthquakes in a quick and robust way. We present results for selected events with well studied source processes (Kokoxili 14.11.2001, Tokachi-Oki 25.09.2003, Nias 28.03.2005). Further, we apply the technique in a semi-real time fashion to broadband data of earthquakes with a broadband magnitude >= 7 (roughly corresponding to Mw 6.5). Processing is based on first automatic detection messages from the GEOFON extended virtual network (GEVN).

It is well known that direct surface waves of large earthquakes are capable of triggering shallow earthquakes and deep tremor at long-range distances. Recent studies have shown that multiple surface waves circling the earth could also remotely trigger microearthquakes. However, it is still not clear whether multiple surface waves returning back to the main shock epicenters could also trigger/modulate aftershock behavior. Here we conduct a study to search for evidence of such triggering by systematically examining aftershock patterns of earthquakes with magnitude ≥ 8 since 1990 that produce observable surface waves circling the globe repeatedly. We specifically examine the 2011 M9 Tohoku-Oki event using a composite catalog of JMA, HiNet and newly detected events obtained by waveform cross correlation. We compute the magnitude of completeness for each sequence, and stack all the sequences together to compute the seismicity and moment rates by sliding data windows. The sequences are also shuffled randomly and these rates are compared to the actual data as well as synthetic aftershock sequences to estimate the statistical significance of the results. Our results suggest that there is some moderate increase of early aftershock activity after a few hours when the surface waves return to the epicentral region. However, we could not completely rule out the possibility that such an increase is purely due to random fluctuations of aftershocks or caused by missing aftershocks in the first few hours after the mainshock.

published_or_final_version / Geography and Geology / Master / Master of Philosophy