It is widely accepted that water-rich serpentinite domains are commonly present in the mantle above shallow subducting slabs and play key roles in controlling the geochemical cycling and physical properties of subduction zones. Thermal and petrological models show the dominant serpentine mineral is antigorite. However, there is no good consensus on the amount, distribution and alignment of this...

The possibility of using accurate numerical methods to simulate seismic wavefields on unstructured meshes for complex rheologies is explored. In particular, the Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) finite element method for seismic wave propagation is extended to the rheological types of viscoelasticity, anisotropy and poroelasticity. First is presented the DG method for the elastic isotropic case on te...

Understanding the dynamics of subduction is critical to our overall understanding of plate tectonics and the solid Earth system. Observations of seismic anisotropy can yield constraints on deformation patterns in the mantle surrounding subducting slabs, providing a tool for studying subduction dynamics. While many observations of seismic anisotropy have been made in subduction systems, our unde...

[1] Residual mantle exposures in the accreted Talkeetna arc, Alaska, provide the first rock analog for the arc-parallel flow that is inferred from seismic anisotropy at several modern arcs. The peridotites exposed at the base of the Jurassic Talkeetna arc have a Moho-parallel foliation and indicate dislocation creep of olivine at temperatures of 1000 to >1100 C. Slip occurred chiefly on the (00...

[1] Seismic anisotropy is a useful indicator for identifying the physical and chemical condition of the Earth’s interior, such as stress and flow fields, and in situ constituent minerals. Using traveltime tomography, we examined threedimensional anisotropic P-wave velocity structure of the Kii Peninsula, southwest Japan, where source regions of megathrust earthquakes along the Nankai Trough are...

A of seismic waves is sensitive to the physical properties of the subsurface and has been observed in vertical seismic profiling (VSP) and reflection data. De et al. (1994) report measurements of the Pand S-wave quality factors from VSP surveys and sonic logs. Klimentos (1995) measures compressional and shear attenuation from sonic logs in sandstone formations with variable oil, water, and gas...

Tight, low-porosity reservoirs can produce significant amounts of hydrocarbons if fracture networks provide the necessary permeability. Characterization of naturally fractured reservoirs using surface seismic data is an important exploration problem that has attracted much attention in the literature. TLE, for example, had an entire issue (August 1996) on this subject. While the data and modeli...

We introduce anisotropy continuation as a process which relates changes in seismic images to perturbations in the anisotropic medium parameters. This process is constrained by two kinematic equations, one for perturbations in the normal-moveout (NMO) velocity and the other for perturbations in the dimensionless anisotropy parameter η. We consider separately the case of post-stack migration and ...