Abstract
The 26 s peak in the ambient seismic noise spectrum is persistently excited and observed at stations globally. Using noise cross-correlation functions (NCFs), the location suggests that the source could be situated in the Gulf of Guinea and Fiji Basin. However, the Fiji Basin was proposed to be the mirror site (near antipode) of the Gulf of Guinea source instead of an independent source, assuming that the surface waves more efficiently propagate along the major-arc paths of oceanic movements. To investigate the propagation of the Rayleigh waves along continental and oceanic paths, we analyzed the surface wave data recorded from an earthquake near the Gulf of Guinea and found that Rayleigh waves travel along continental minor-arc paths more efficiently than along oceanic major-arc paths. We then located the source in the western Pacific Ocean from group velocities measured with earthquake data by using the travel time misfit in NCFs after calibration and concluded that the source is in the Vanuatu Islands. Moreover, the temporal variation of the 26 s microseismic peak observed in the western Pacific seismic stations is very different from that in stations near the Gulf of Guinea, which suggests that they are excited by independent sources. Therefore, the Vanuatu source should be an independent microseismic source. As it is close to volcanoes in the Vanuatu islands, the Pacific 26 s microseismic source might be excited by magmatic processes, which are also responsible for very-long-period volcanic tremors.
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Acknowledgments
The waveform data was downloaded from IRIS DMC. This study was supported by CAS (KZCX2-EW-121), National Key Basic Research Program of China (Grant No. 2013CB733203), and National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 41204044, 41274069). ZXF was supported by China Postdoctral Science Foundation (No. 2012M520431). The study is also supported by the CAS/SAFEA International Partnership Program for Creative Research Teams (Grant No. KZZD-EW-TZ-05).
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Figure S1. (Top) The 26 s Rayleigh wave group velocity map. The CRUST 2.0 model is the input model. The white box covers the stations used by Shapiro et al. (2006); (Bottom) the different travel times predicted by the homogeneous (c = 4.05 km/s) and the heterogeneous model. The black solid line denotes the great circle linking the station and the antipode, whereas the white dashed line is the ray path predicted by the heterogeneous model.
Figure S2. The source location obtained from energy stacking by using the earthquake calibration.
Figure S3. Top: the earthquake and stations in East Asia (Group 1, blue box), and stations in Australia and South Pacific (Group 2, red box). The minor-arc paths are shown as red lines. Bottom: the radiation pattern of the Rayleigh waves at 10, 26, and 100 s (first column). The record sections of the two bands (0.03–0.05 and 0.002–0.02 Hz) are displayed in the two right columns. The dashed lines denote the estimated arrival times of R1 and R2. In the record sections, blue traces and red traces are for stations in the blue box and the red box at the top panel, respectively.
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Zeng, X., Ni, S. Evidence for an Independent 26-s Microseismic Source near the Vanuatu Islands. Pure Appl. Geophys. 171, 2155–2163 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00024-014-0811-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00024-014-0811-1