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Depth of a Mid-crustal Discontinuity beneath Mt. Vesuvius from the Stacking of Reflected and Converted Waves on Local Earthquake Records

Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, 94, 5, 1842–1849, 2004
Vincenzo Nisii, Aldo Zollo and Giovanni Iannaccone

 

Abstract

We have developed a technique based on the move-out and stack of reflected seismic phases from local earthquake seismograms. For a given interface depth and a velocity model, the theoretical travel times of reflected/converted phases in a 1D medium are computed and used to align in time the vertical-component microearthquake records collected by a local seismic network. The locations and origin times of events are preliminarily estimated from P and S arrival times. Different seismic gathers are obtained for each considered reflected/converted phase at that interface, and the best interface depth is chosen as the one that maximizes the value of a semblance function computed on moved-out records. This method has been applied to seismic records of microearthquakes that occur at Mt. Vesuvius volcano. The analysis confirms the evidence for an 8 to 10-km-deep seismic discontinuity beneath the volcano, which was previously identified, by migration of active seismic data, as the roof of an extended magmatic sill.

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