Temporal changes in the lunar soil from correlation of diffuse vibrations

International audienceIt was recently demonstrated that one can reconstruct the impulse response between passive sensors, by cross-correlating diffuse waves or ambient noise. Using seismic waves recorded on the moon, we show here that not only direct waves can be retrieved but also late arrivals that have been scattered before reaching the seismometers. As these late arrivals propagate for longer time, they are more sensitive to weak perturbations of the medium such as velocity changes. This high sensitivity of scattered waves is used to monitor periodic velocity changes in the lunar soil by measuring small delays of the passively retrieved coda waves. The velocity changes result from temperature variations due to periodic heating of the lunar surface by the sun

Dynamics of Piton de la Fournaise volcano observed by passive image interferometry with multiple references

AbstractActivity of Piton de la Fournaise (PdF) volcano in La Réunion Island modifies the seismic velocities within the edifice. Using the 2010 and 2011 data from a network of 21 seismic stations in the vicinity of PdF, changes of seismic velocities are investigated using passive image interferometry, i.e. interferometry of seismic noise correlations. As noise correlations change significantly over time in response to volcanic activity, a method is presented that allows us to measure continuous long term velocity changes with high and constant accuracy by using multiple periods as reference. A long term velocity increase is found that averages about 0.25% per year. This trend is superimposed by short term changes that exhibit a clear connection with summit seismo-tectonic earthquakes indicating the effect of volcanic activity. Characteristic signatures of velocity changes are identified for post-eruptive periods of deflation that show an increase of velocity associated with subsidence observed by GPS. Periods of pre-eruptive inflation are characterized by decreasing velocity. Seismic crises can be associated with either increasing or decreasing velocity depending on whether the magma movement leads to deflation due to an eruption emptying the shallow plumbing system or to inflation caused by a non-eruptive intrusion. With a simple assumption about the spatial sensitivity of the measurements both processes are found to have the strongest effect in the central summit area of the volcano which also shows the strongest surface displacements during the time investigated here. We do not observe a dependence of the velocity change on the location of the erupting fissures, instead the distribution of changes for the three inflation periods and the two eruptions are similar indicating that the velocity changes observed here reflect the dynamics of a shallow magma reservoir rather than the effect of the eruption at the surface

Probing the in situ Elastic Nonlinearity of Rocks with Earth Tides and Seismic Noise

Heterogeneous materials such as rocks, concrete, and granular materials exhibit a strong elastic nonlinearity. The sensitivity of the elastic nonlinearity to the applied stress and pore pressure in principle allows the use of seismic waves for remote observations of stress or pore pressure changes. Yet the nonlinearity of rocks is difficult to quantify in situ as active deformation tests are not possible in the field. We investigate the elastic nonlinearity in a fully natural experiment using the ambient seismic noise of a single seismic station to sense changes of the seismic velocity in the subsurface reaching 0.026% in response to the minute deformation caused by various constituents of the tidal forces exerted by the Sun and Moon

Imaging of Small-Scale Heterogeneity and Absorption Using Adjoint Envelope Tomography: Results From Laboratory Experiments

To complement the information provided by deterministic seismic imaging at length scales above a certain resolution limit we present the first application of adjoint envelope tomography (AET) to experimental data. AET uses the full envelopes of seismic records including scattered coda waves to obtain information about the distribution of absorption and small-scale heterogeneity which provide complementary information about the investigated medium. Being below the resolution limit this small-scale structure cannot be resolved by conventional tomography but still affects wave propagation by attenuating ballistic waves and generating scattered waves. Using ultrasound data from embedded sensors in a meter-sized concrete specimen we image the distribution of absorption and heterogeneity expressed by the intrinsic quality factor Q−1 and the fluctuation strength ɛ that characterizes the strength of the heterogeneity. The forward problem is solved by modeling the 2-D multiple nonisotropic scattering in an acoustic medium with spatially variable heterogeneity and attenuation using the Monte-Carlo method. Gradients for the model updates are obtained by convolution with the back-propagated envelope misfit using the adjoint formalism in analogy to full waveform inversion. We use a late coda time window to invert for absorption and an earlier time window to infer the distribution of heterogeneity. The results successfully locate an area of salt concrete with increased scattering and concentric anomalies of intrinsic attenuation. The resolution test shows that the recovered anomalies constitute reasonable representations of internal structure of the specimen

Deciphering the Whisper of Volcanoes: Monitoring Velocity Changes at Kamchatka's Klyuchevskoy Group With Fluctuating Noise Fields

Volcanic inflation and deflation often precede eruptions and can lead to seismic velocity changes (dv/v $dv/v$) in the subsurface. Recently, interferometry on the coda of ambient noise‐cross‐correlation functions yielded encouraging results in detecting these changes at active volcanoes. Here, we analyze seismic data recorded at the Klyuchevskoy Volcanic Group in Kamchatka, Russia, between summer of 2015 and summer of 2016 to study signals related to volcanic activity. However, ubiquitous volcanic tremors introduce distortions in the noise wavefield that cause artifacts in the dv/v $dv/v$ estimates masking the impact of physical mechanisms. To avoid such instabilities, we propose a new technique called time‐segmented passive image interferometry. In this technique, we employ a hierarchical clustering algorithm to find periods in which the wavefield can be considered stationary. For these periods, we perform separate noise interferometry studies. To further increase the temporal resolution of our results, we use an AI‐driven approach to find stations with similar dv/v $dv/v$ responses and apply a spatial stack. The impacts of snow load and precipitation dominate the resulting dv/v $dv/v$ time series, as we demonstrate with the help of a simple model. In February 2016, we observe an abrupt velocity drop due to the M7.2 Zhupanov earthquake. Shortly after, we register a gradual velocity increase of about 0.3% at Bezymianny Volcano coinciding with surface deformation observed using remote sensing techniques. We suggest that the inflation of a shallow reservoir related to the beginning of Bezymianny's 2016/2017 eruptive cycle could have caused this local velocity increase and a decorrelation of the correlation function coda