Perspectives on Geoacoustic Inversion of Ocean Bottom Reflectivity Data

This paper focuses on acoustic reflectivity of the ocean bottom, and describes inversion of reflection data from an experiment designed to study the physical properties and structure of the ocean bottom. The formalism of Bayesian inference is reviewed briefly to establish an understanding of the approach for inversion that is in widespread use. A Bayesian inversion of ocean bottom reflection coefficient versus angle data to estimate geoacoustic model parameters of young oceanic crust is presented. The data were obtained in an experiment to study the variation of sound speed in crustal basalt with age of the crust at deep water sites in the Pacific Ocean where the sediment deposits overlying the basalt are very thin. The inversion results show that sound speed of both compressional and shear waves is increasing with crustal age over the track of the experiment where age increased from 40 to 70 million years.