Towards a Comprehensive Seismic Velocity Model for the Broader Africa-Eurasia Collision Region, to Improve Nuclear Explosion Monitoring

We report on progress towards a new, comprehensive three-dimensional model of seismic velocity in a broad region encompassing the Middle East, northern Africa, the Mediterranean Sea, the Levant, the Arabian Peninsula, the Turkish-Iranian Plateau, Indus Valley, and the Hindu Kush. Our model will be based on regional waveform fits, surface wave group velocity measurements, teleseismic arrival times of S and P waves, receiver functions, and published results from active source experiments. We are in the process of assembling each of these data sets and testing the joint inversion for subsets of the data. Seismograms come from a variety of permanent and temporary seismic stations in the region. Some of the data is easily accessible through, for example, IRIS, while collection of other data is more involved. This work builds on ongoing work by Schmid et al. (GJI, 2004, and manuscript in preparation). In these proceedings we highlight our data sets and their inferences, demonstrate the proposed new data-inversion modeling methodology, discuss results from preliminary inversions of subsets of the data, and demonstrate the prediction of arrival times with three-dimensional velocity models. We compare our preliminary inversion results to the results of Schmid et al., and the predicted arrival times to ground-truth data from the NNSA Knowledge Base. Our data sets are simultaneously redundant and highly complementary. The combined data coverage will ensure that our three-dimensional model comprises the crust, the upper mantle, including the transition zone, and the top of the lower mantle, with spatially varying, but useful resolution. The region of interest is one of the most structurally heterogeneous in the world. Continental collision, rifting and sea-floor spreading, back-arc spreading, oceanic subduction, rotating micro plates, continental shelf, and stable platforms, are just some of the region's characteristics. Seismicity and the distribution of seismic stations are also geographically heterogeneous. The crustal thickness ranges from near 20 to near 45 km under dry places in the Mediterranean region alone, which contains at least seven of the fourteen types of crust defined globally by Mooney et al. (1998). The S-velocity varies laterally by an entire 1 km/s over 1000 km within the uppermost mantle. On average the S-velocity is 50 to 150 m/s slower, between a depth of 150 km and the Moho, than global model iasp91. These lowered S velocities reflect the high amount of tectonic activity in the study region. In the transition zone the S-velocity is roughly 150 m/s higher than iasp91. These heightened S velocities likely reflect the numerous fragments of oceanic lithosphere that subducted in the study region during geologically relatively recent times