High-frequency passive surface wave tomography at the Marathon PGE-Cu deposit (Ontario, Canada): Bridging the gap between natural and anthropogenic noise sources

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniela Teodor ◽  
Laura Pinzon-Rincon ◽  
Aurélien Mordret ◽  
François Lavoué ◽  
Sophie Beaupretre ◽  
...  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniela Teodor ◽  
Charles Beard ◽  
Laura Alejandra Pinzon-Rincon ◽  
Aurélien Mordret ◽  
François Lavoué ◽  
...  

<p>Ambient noise surface wave tomography (ANSWT) is an environmentally friendly and cost-effective technique for subsurface imaging. In this study, we used natural (low-frequency) and anthropogenic (high-frequency) noise sources to map the velocity structure of the Marathon Cu-PGE deposit (Ontario, Canada) to a depth of 1 km. The Marathon deposit is a circular (ø = 25 km) alkaline intrusion comprising gabbros at the rim and an overlying series of syenites in the centre. Cu-PGE mineralisation is hosted by gabbros close to the inward-dipping footwall of the intrusion. The country rocks are Archaean volcanic breccias that are seismically slower than the gabbros, and similar in velocity to the syenites. We used ANSWT to image the footwall contact that controls the location of the mineralisation.</p><p>An array of 1024 vertical-component receivers were deployed for 30 days to record ambient noise required for surface wave analysis. Two overlapping grids were used: a 200 m x 6040 m dense array with node spacing of 50 m, and a 2500 m x 4000 m sparse array with node spacing of 150 m.  The signal was down-sampled to 50 Hz, divided into segments of 30 minutes, cross-correlated and stacked. Surface wave analysis was conducted over the dense array and the sparse array data. We considered the fundamental mode of Rayleigh wave propagation for our frequency-wavenumber (F-K) analysis and focused on the phase velocity variation in the high-frequency ambient noise signal (up to 22 Hz). We reconstructed the shallow structure with progressively increased resolution using surface wave dispersion curves extracted from receiver arrays divided into segments of variable lengths. Several average dispersion curves were computed from individual dispersion curves belonging to different seismic lines. Each average dispersion curve was inverted to obtain S-wave velocity models using an McMC transdimensional Bayesian approach.</p><p>The tomographic images reveal a shallow high-velocity anomaly, which we interpret as being related to the gabbro intrusion that hosts the mineralization. The large-wavelength structures in the S-wave velocity models are relatively consistent with the geological structures inferred from surface mapping and drill core data. These results show that the ANSWT, focused on the high-frequency signal provided by anthropogenic noise sources, is an efficient technique for imaging “shallow" (1 km depth) geological structures in a mineral exploration context. </p>


2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. Kumar ◽  
X. Yuan ◽  
R. Kind ◽  
J. Mechie

Abstract. The dense deployment of seismic stations so far in the western half of the United States within the USArray project provides the opportunity to study in greater detail the structure of the lithosphere-asthenosphere system. We use the S receiver function technique for this purpose which has higher resolution than surface wave tomography, is sensitive to seismic discontinuities and has no problems with multiples like P receiver functions. Only two major discontinuities are observed in the entire area down to about 300 km depth. These are the crust-mantle boundary (Moho) and a negative boundary which we correlate with the lithosphere-asthenosphere boundary (LAB) since a low velocity zone is the classical definition of the seismic observation of the asthenosphere by Gutenberg (1926). Our S receiver function LAB is at a depth of 70–80 km in large parts of westernmost North America. East of the Rocky Mountains its depth is generally between 90 and 110 km. Regions with LAB depths down to about 140 km occur in a stretch from northern Texas over the Colorado Plateau to the Columbia Basalts. These observations agree well with tomography results in the westernmost USA and at the east coast. However, in the central cratonic part of the USA the tomography LAB is near 200 km depth. At this depth no discontinuity is seen in the S receiver functions. The negative signal near 100 km depth in the central part of the USA is interpreted by Yuan and Romanowicz (2010) or Lekic and Romanowicz (2011) as a recently discovered mid lithospheric discontinuity (MLD). A solution for the discrepancy between receiver function imaging and surface wave tomography is not yet obvious and requires more high resolution studies at other cratons before a general solution may be found. Our results agree well with petrophysical models of increased water content in the asthenosphere, which predict a sharp and shallow LAB also in continents (Mierdel et al., 2007).


2007 ◽  
Vol 171 (3) ◽  
pp. 1098-1117 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Peter ◽  
C. Tape ◽  
L. Boschi ◽  
J. H. Woodhouse

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