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Estimation of seismic and elastic properties of the crust and upper mantle beneath the Korean Peninsula
  • Jaewook Lee
Jaewook Lee
University of Texas at Dallas

Corresponding Author:leegeophysics@gmail.com

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Abstract

It is important to perform the quantitative interpretation of the continental margin lithosphere for a more accurate and comprehensive understanding of its tectonic behavior. In this study, we derived the seismic and elastic properties from the 2D seismic data recorded by the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA) in 2014. In general, most of the previous researches have been based on travel time tomography or Full Waveform Inversion (FWI) methods. However, these methods are not robust to directly apply to the seismic ambient noise data due to its low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Therefore, we conducted L2-norm model-based impedance inversion to not only delineate the local geological structures but also suppress the meaningless footprints in the observed data. Moreover, we used FWEA18 models (Tao et al., 2018) as initial velocity and density models to create the inversion result more stable and accurate. Then, we interpreted the lithosphere and asthenosphere from the inverted P-impedance model, which is more obvious than the interpretation of the pre-existing data. The average depths of Moho and Lithosphere-Asthenosphere-Boundary (LAB) are 30 km and 80km, respectively. Furthermore, we estimated the change of bulk density as well as P- and S-wave velocities of the crust, lithospheric mantle, and asthenospheric mantle. Also, we predicted four elastic properties of each layer from the inverted seismic properties, such as bulk modulus, shear modulus, Young’s modulus, and Poisson’s ratio. These model results can help to understand the physical state and elastic behavior variations of the lithospheric and asthenospheric mantle as well as local lithospheric structures beneath the peninsula.