Travel time tomography of the crust and the mantle beneath Ecuador from data of the national seismic network.

Resumen

Although there have been numerous studies on the geodynamics and the tectonics in Ecuador based on the seismic activity, there has not been to date a comprehensive tomography study using the entire database of the National Seismic Network (RENSIG). Only a preliminary limited study was performed by Prevot et al. to infer a simple P velocity model in central Ecuador, and several profiles in the South-Colombian-Ecuador margin were also investigated by using travel time inversion of wide-angle seismic data obtained during the two marine experiments SISTEUR and SALIERI. Inverting the hundreds of thousands of arrival times of P and S waves of uneven quality that constitutes the RENSIG catalogue is the challenging subject of this thesis.We describe how we complemented the RENSIG catalogue with data from the Northern Peru network and how we homogenized and filtered the resulting dataset of more than 800 000 first arrival times of P and S waves corresponding to more than 50 000 earthquakes. To invert these data for both the velocity models and the event locations we adopted a Bayesian approach. We show how the problem can be recast in the Gaussian framework by changes of variable while imposing a robust statistics to the data, and how it leads to a generalized nonlinear least squares problem. We detail in particular the regularization of the models through the smoothing and damping properties of the covariance kernels. We also show that inverting differences in data instead of the raw data amounts to the introduction of specific correlation terms in the data covariance matrix, while keeping the same set of data. We finally indicate how the computation of the averaging index allows the delimitation of a confidence region for the resulting model.The practical inversion has been carried out by using the two Fortran 2003 codes (B. Potin, B. Valette, V. Monteiller): LOCIN (prior localization) and INSIGHT (tomography). The final study region is a parallelepipedic box of 590times770 km^2 area and 244 km height that contains the topography of the surface. The models consist of the v_P and v_P/v_S fields discretized over a grid, the spacing of which is 5 km in the horizontal directions and 2 km in the vertical one, and of the spatial and temporal parameters of the seismic events. A battery of tests allowed us to set reasonable values for these tuning parameters through an L-curve analysis.We obtained the spatial distribution of the seismicity with an improved accuracy which allows us to describe with more details the shallow seismic clusters, as those of Pisayambo, Macas, Reventador, and to identify lineaments in the seismicity in relation with tectonics. We obtained also a clear image of the intermediate depth seismicity wich is dominated by 4 nests, namely the Maldonado, La Man'a, and Guayaquil nests, at depths ranging between 75 km and 115 km, and the Puyo nest at much deeper depths. The Wadati-Benioff zone allowed us to clearly defined the topography of the slab only to a depth to about 110-150 km, depending on the latitude, and to observe the decrease of the dip angle from about 25° in northern and central Ecuador down to about 10° in southern Ecuador and northern Peru. On the other hand, the analysis of the P velocity clearly suggests that the slab is broken in two pieces, the southern one passing under the northern at the level of the Puyo nest. The v_P/v_S model presents a high anomaly of the ratio along the western cordillera at a depth ranging between 30 km and 50 km that characterized partially melted rocks and corresponds to the feeding reservoir of the volcanic arc. Finally, we deduced the Moho depth from our model by taking the depth for which the norm of the velocity gradient is maximum between 7.2 and 7.4 km/s and by incorporating information on the Moho depth provided by the SISTEUR and SALIERI experiments in the convergent margin.