Research and verification of the earth’s crust velocity models by mathematical simulation and active seismology methods

The article discusses a comparison of theoretical seismograms for two velocity models of the Earth's crust and P-wave arrival times estimated from experimental vibration seismograms for the 400-km long section of the Baikal–Ulaanbaatar profile. The theoretical seismograms were obtained by mathematical simulation of wave fields using the Earth's crust velocity models based on the data of the BEST and PASSCAL experiments. Vibration seismograms were obtained by measuring the wave field of a CVO-100 vibrator in the SB RAS Southern Baikal polygon. In the experiments, the vibration seismograms show that arrival times in the P-wave group correspond to the values for waves of large amplitudes in the theoretical seismograms. The P-wave arrival times in the theoretical seismograms of the BEST experiment are compared to the values in the experimental vibration seismograms for the 400-km long section of the Baikal–Ulaanbaatar profile. This comparison shows that the arrival times of maximum amplitude waves correspond to the theoretical hodographs of waves with velocities of 6.25–6.80 km/sec in the BEST experiment velocity model. At the same time, the experimental data set does not contain arrival times corresponding to longitudinal waves with Vp=7.25 km/sec, which are related to an assumed layer (more than 10 km thick) in the lower crust for the BEST experiment velocity model. In the experiments, the P-wave arrival times in the vibration seismograms correspond to the P-wave arrival times in the theoretical seismograms of the PASSCAL experiment throughout the entire 400-km long section of the Baikal–Ulaanbaatar profile. It is thus confirmed that the average values of the wave velocities in the PASSCAL velocity model have been reliably estimated. It should be noted that the experimental values of the arrival times of the first wave in the P-wave group are in agreement with the first arrival times in the hodographs of the theoretical seismograms for the velocity model in the PASSCAL experiment considering the distances from the source in a range of 65–380 km.

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