Ambient noise Love wave attenuation tomography for the LASSIE array across the Los Angeles basin

Xin Liu; Gregory C Beroza; Lei Yang; William L Ellsworth

doi:10.1126/sciadv.abe1030

Ambient noise Love wave attenuation tomography for the LASSIE array across the Los Angeles basin

Sci Adv. 2021 May 28;7(22):eabe1030. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abe1030. Print 2021 May.

Authors

Xin Liu¹, Gregory C Beroza², Lei Yang^{2

3}, William L Ellsworth¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Geophysics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.
² Department of Geophysics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA. beroza@stanford.edu yanglei@stanford.edu.
³ State Key Laboratory of Lithospheric Evolution, Institute of Geology and Geophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100029, China.

Abstract

The Los Angeles basin is located within the North America-Pacific plate boundary and contains multiple earthquake faults that threaten greater Los Angeles. Seismic attenuation tomography has the potential to provide important constraints on wave propagation in the basin and to provide supplementary information on structure in the form of the distribution of anelastic properties. On the basis of the amplitude information from seismic interferometry from the linear LASSIE array in the Los Angeles basin, we apply station-triplet attenuation tomography to obtain a 2D depth profile for the attenuation structure of the uppermost 0.6 km. The array crosses four Quaternary faults, three of which are blind. The attenuation tomography resolves strong attenuation (shear attenuation Q_s ~ 20) for the fault zones and is consistent with sharp boundaries across them.

Copyright © 2021 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC).