Abstract: Seismic tomography is a powerful method to image the earth's interior in three dimensions using seismic waves from natural earthquakes recorded at stations located at or near the surface around the world. It is an ill-posed inverse problem constrained by the available distribution of earthquakes and recording stations. We introduce the principles of seismic tomography, which parts of the mantle can be illuminated by which types of seismic waves, and the key ingredients necessary for setting up a tomographic inversion, focusing primarily on global and large scale regional inversions. We distinguish P and S travel time tomography, tomography based on surface wave dispersion, as well as full waveform tomography, which aims at utilizing all of the information contained in earthquake recordings in a given frequency band. We discuss recent advances owing to the introduction of finite frequency kernels in travel time tomography, as well as wavefield computations using numerical integration of the wave equation in the case of full waveform inversion. We compare robust features of mantle models at the global and continental scale in terms of geographic distribution of lateral variations in structure as well as spectra. We briefly discuss anelastic tomography, the challenge of retrieving density structure as well as how issues of resolution, uncertainty and non-uniqueness can be addressed in this type of imaging.
Publication Year: 2021
Publication Date: 2021-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 3
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