ALBERT

Description: Oceanic crust forms at mid-ocean spreading centres through a combination of magmatic and tectonic processes, with the magmatic processes creating two distinct layers: the upper and the lower crust. While the upper crust is known to form from lava flows and basaltic dykes based on geophysical and drilling results, the formation of the gabbroic lower crust is still debated. Here we perform a full waveform inversion of wide-angle seismic data from relatively young (7–12-Myr-old) crust formed at the slow-spreading Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The seismic velocity model reveals alternating, 400–500 m thick, high- and low-velocity layers with ±200 m s−1 velocity variations, below ~2 km from the oceanic basement. The uppermost low-velocity layer is consistent with hydrothermal alteration, defining the base of extensive hydrothermal circulation near the ridge axis. The underlying layering supports that the lower crust is formed through the intrusion of melt as sills at different depths, which cool and crystallize in situ. The layering extends up to 5–15 km distance along the seismic profile, covering 300,000–800,000 years, suggesting that this form of lower crustal accretion is a stable process.

Description: Seismic full waveform inversion (FWI) is a powerful method for estimating quantitative subsurface physical parameters from seismic data. As the full waveform inversion is a non-linear problem, the linearized approach updates model iteratively from an initial model, which can get trapped in local minima. In the presence of a high velocity contrast, such as at Moho, the reflection coefficient and recorded waveforms from wide-aperture seismic acquisition are extremely non-linear around critical angles. The problem at the Moho is further complicated by the interference of lower crustal (Pg) and upper mantle (Pn) turning ray arrivals with the critically reflected Moho arrivals (PmP). In order to determine velocity structure near Moho, a non-linear method should be used. We propose to solve this strong non-linear FWI problem at Moho using a trans-dimensional Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method, where the earth model between lower crust and upper mantle is idealy parameterized with a 1-D assumption using a variable number of velocity interfaces. Different from common MCMC methods that require determining the number of unknown as a fixed prior before inversion, trans-dimensional MCMC allows the flexibility for an automatic estimation of both the model complexity (e.g. the number of velocity interfaces) and the velocity-depth structure from the data. We first test the algorithm on synthetic data using four representative Moho models and then apply to an ocean bottom seismometer (OBS) data from the Mid-Atlantic Ocean. A 2-D finite-difference solution of an acoustic wave equation is used for data simulation at each iteration of MCMC search, for taking into account the lateral heterogeneities in the upper crust, which is constrained from travel time tomography and is kept unchanged during inversion; the 1-D model parameterization near Moho enables an efficient search of the trans-dimensional model space. Inversion results indicate that, with very little prior and the wide-aperture seismograms, the trans-dimensional FWI method is able to infer the posterior distribution of both the number of velocity interfaces and the velocity-depth model for a strong nonlinear problem, making the inversion a complete data-driven process. The distribution of interface matches the velocity discontinuities. We find that the Moho in the study area is a transition zone of 0.7 km, or a sharp boundary with velocities from around 7 km/s in the lower crust to 8 km/s of the upper mantle; both provide nearly identical waveform match for the field data. The ambiguity comes from the resolution limit of the band-limited seismic data and limited offset range for PmP arrivals.