Receiver Function Migration of Broadband Seismograms recorded by the International Maule Aftershock Deployment (IMAD) in Central Chile

The Mw=8.8 Maule earthquake that occurred off the coast of Chile on February 27, 2010 is one of the largest megathrust earthquakes ever to be recorded and ruptured ~600 km of the plate boundary. This segment of the Nazca-South America plate boundary is an ideal region to investigate the processes related to the structure of the down-dip edge of the seismogenic zone, forearc wedge and subducting slab. Immediately after the Maule earthquake, international teams from France, Germany, Great Britain and the United States joined Chilean seismologists to install an array of seismic stations between 33°-38.5°S, from the coast to the foothills of the Andes to produce the International Maule Aftershock Deployment (IMAD) data set. These arrays were deployed from mid-March until the end of December 2010 in order to capture and study the aftershocks in and around the rupture zone, and to better understand crustal and mantle wedge structure. We calculated receiver functions (RFs) from P and PP phases and made Common Conversion Point stacks to image the structures in the slab and forearc wedge down to a depth of 100 km. We have identified the oceanic slab Moho on several E-W and N-S profiles at 40 to 60 km depth beneath the array and several discontinuities above the slab in the forearc. These profiles also show a large low-velocity zone beneath the northern half of the array in the forearc. In addition, we are using a 2.5D finite difference teleseismic waveform tomography technique described in Roecker et al. (2010) to image the crust and upper mantle beneath that part of the Chilean Andes occupied by the IMAD array and the earlier TIPTEQ deployment of Rietbrock et al. (2005). While the technique does not require any kind of formal source deconvolution, in sparse deployments we can apply this technique in an RF type migration by normalizing medium sensitivities. Both these techniques will improve our imaging of the down-dip limit of the seismogenic zone, forearc wedge and subducted slab. Rietbrock, A., Haberland, C., Bataille, K., Dahm, T. & Oncken, O. (2005) Studying the Seismogenic Coupling Zone with a Passive Seismic Array, EOS, 86(32), 293-300. Roecker, S., B. Baker, and J. McLaughlin, A finite- difference algorithm for full waveform teleseismic tomographyGeophysical Journal International (May 2010), 181(2):1017-1040