Publication 69

Waves of the future: superior inferences from collocated seismic and electromagnetic experiments

Alan G. Jones

Abstract

The advent of high quality seismological studies of the Earth's continental lithosphere has been paralleled by an explosion in both the quality and quantity of concomitant high resolution electromagnetic studies. The latter were inspired by technological and intellectual advances during the last decade in the acquisition, processing, modeling and inversion of particularly natural­source magnetotelluric (MT) data. The complimentary nature of seismics and MT leads to rejection of hypotheses that may be tenable if only one of them is applied. Equally, inferences supported by both have stronger conviction. Perhaps most useful is when apparent incompatibilities must be reconciled by re­examination of both datasets. This is demonstrated through examples of magnetotelluric and seismic reflection studies undertaken in the last decade in many tectonic environs, from Paleoproterozoic collision zones to passive margins to active collision zones. Some aspects of MT are explained, particularly the method's sensitivity and resolution of geoelectric directionality and dimensionality. New directions are proposed whereby greater utility of the joint datasets can occur, both at the outset during data acquisition, and in the interpretation phase in modeling and inversion. Also, laboratory measurements of seismic, electrical and rheological properties of the same rock sample will make integrated interpretation more tenable

Source

Tetonophysics, 286, 273-298, 1998.

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Alan G Jones / 10 June 2004 / alan-at-cp.dias.ie