[1] A high resolution P-wave image of Mt. Vesuvius edifice has been derived from simultaneous inversion of travel times and hypocentral parameters of local earthquakes, land based shots and small aperture array data. The results give details down to 300-500 m. The relocated local seismicity appears to extend down to 5 km below the central crater, distributed in a major cluster, centered at 3 km below the central crater and in a minor group, with diffuse hypocenters inside the volcanic edifice. The two clusters are separated by an anomalously high Vp region at around 1 km depth. A zone with high Vp/Vs in the upper layers is interpreted as produced by the presence of intense fluid circulation. The highest energy quakes (up to M = 3.6) are located in the deeper cluster, in a high P-wave velocity zone. Our results favor an interpretation in terms of absence of shallow magma reservoirs.

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This paper reviews the main observations on slow earthquakes and low frequency tremor made along the Apennines, the main seismic active zone of Italy. These observations have been made using a geodetic interferometer system operating since 1994 in the underground tunnel of Gran Sasso, central Italy, and an underground seismic array (UNDERSEIS) operating since 2002 in the same environment. The observations made in recent years indicate that both phenomena are quite rare and apparently uncorrelated. Slow earthquakes, mainly recorded in 1997 and occasionally later, have probably been caused by the activity of a shallow fault system located near the interferometers. Until now only one tremor episode characterized by low frequency content and duration of several hours has been detected in January 2004, without any correlations with the occurrence of slow or regular earthquakes. The signal to noise ratio of this event is very low, but the results of our detailed analysis show that its frequency contents and wave field characteristics are compatible with a low frequency non volcanic tremor.

This paper presents the first results from the operation of a dense seismic array deployed in the underground Physics Laboratories at Gran Sasso (Central Italy). The array consists of 13 short-period, three-component seismometers with an aperture of about 550 m and average sensor spacing of 90 m. The reduced sensor spacing, joined to the spatially-white character of the background noise allows for quick and reliable detection of coherent wavefront arrivals even under very poor SNR conditions. We apply high-resolution frequency-slowness and polarization analyses to a set of 27 earthquakes recorded between November, 2002, and September, 2003, at epicentral distances spanning the 20-140 km interval. We locate these events using inversion of P-and S-wave backazimuths and S-P delay times, and compare the results with data from the Centralized National Seismic Network catalog. For the case of S-wave, the discrepancies among the two set of locations never exceed 10 km; the largest errors are instead observed for the case of P-waves. This observation may be due to the fact that the small array aperture does not allow for robust assessment of waves propagating at high apparent velocities. This information is discussed with special reference to the directions of future studies aimed at elucidating the location of seismogenetic structures in Central Italy from extended analysis of the micro-seismicity.