Project Details
Projekt
Imaging the Alpine crust with ambient-noise tomography: linking surface observations to deep structures
Applicant
Dr. Emanuel David Kästle
Subject Area
Palaeontology
Geophysics
Geophysics
Term
since 2020
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 442498846
The research proposal aims to provide a better understanding of the tectonic processes that are responsible for the Alps in their current shape and the ongoing deformations such as uplift of the Alps or the many small to moderate-sized earthquakes, occurring regularly in the Alps. It will focus on the last 20 Million years of collision history of the Adriatic and European plates in the Alps. 3-dimensional, tomographic images of the Earth’s crust will be created to resolve the subsurface structures in detail. The proposed method is based on acoustic signals that are constantly generated by the roll of ocean waves and that propagate as surface waves through the solid Earth. These signals are recorded by the recently placed, dense AlpArray and Swath D seismic station networks. By cross-correlating the recordings between station pairs, signal travel times can be determined and thus the shear-velocity structure at depth. This approach has been successfully applied in other dense station networks such as USArray and is well suited to image the subsurface down to approximately 50 km depth. The close station spacing of the Swath D network allows to measure waves at high frequencies that are otherwise undetectable. This offers the opportunity to resolve also very shallow structures, above 1 km depth, which is a unique chance to link information from the surface geology to depth. This proposal will use a state-of-the-art probabilistic approach to derive the final models, in order to keep track of model uncertainties and to be able to easily include also other geophysical information such as gravity-field measurements. The obtained crustal structures will serve as additional input in several other models that will be generated in the framework of this priority programme and contribute to the interpretations on the geodynamic evolution and tectonic history of the Alpine system.
DFG Programme
Priority Programmes
