Strong ground motion can induce dynamic strains large enough for the Earth's subsurface to respond nonlinearly and to cause permanent, or plastic, damage. The 2011 Mw 9.0 Tohoku‐Oki earthquake, Japan, generated exceptional and well‐recorded ground motions in the greater Tokyo area. We use continuous records from 234 stations of the dense MeSO‐net seismic network to monitor the temporal evolution of the material properties of the shallow subsurface (upper ∼100 m). We apply the single‐station cross‐correlation method to reconstruct the near‐surface reflectivity response through time. We find that the strong ground motions from the mainshock caused large perturbations in the near‐surface structure, with significant drops in seismic velocities up to 11%. For most sites, we observe a logarithmic and complete recovery of the seismic wave speed, suggesting a relaxation process that can be explained by a viscoelastic rheology. Some sites exhibit an instantaneous and permanent change, which suggests a plastic rheology. Finally, dense seismic measurements allow for statistical inference between seismic velocity drops, recovery time scales, and permanent perturbations and ground motion strength and site conditions. This study highlights the potential for seismic interferometry to assess near‐surface rheology with dense seismic arrays.
Seismic waves propagating through the Earth can be significantly affected by velocity structures such as sedimentary basins. We investigate the propagation characteristics of seismic waves across the Kanto basin, Japan, using Green's functions extracted from the ambient seismic field. We use two stations situated on the eastern and southern edges of the basin as virtual sources, and approximately 420 stations, which are mainly a part of the Metropolitan Seismic Observation network (MeSO‐net), as receivers. Using seismometers aligned along two straight lines with the virtual sources, we find that several types of waves can be recovered, each with different sensitivities to the layers that compose the basin. We also show that after amplitude calibration, the extracted Green's functions can accurately simulate the seismic waves of two moderate Mw 4–5 shallow earthquakes that occurred close to the virtual sources. Furthermore, we find that the distribution of the 5% damped pseudovelocity response at a period of 6 s computed from the records of each event and the Green's function waveforms have similar amplification patterns. This study supports the fact that dense networks recording continuously the ambient seismic field in metropolitan areas can be used to accurately assess seismic hazard at high spatial resolution.
Seismic interferometry is now widely used to retrieve the impulse response function of the Earth between two distant seismometers. The phase information has been the focus of most passive imaging studies, as conventional seismic tomography uses traveltime measurements. The amplitude information, however, is harder to interpret because it strongly depends on the distribution of ambient seismic field sources and on the multitude of processing methods. Our study focuses on the latter by comparing the amplitudes of the impulse response functions calculated between seismic stations in the Kanto sedimentary basin, Japan, using several processing techniques. This region provides a unique natural laboratory to test the reliability of the amplitudes with complex wave propagation through the basin, and dense observations from the Metropolitan Seismic Observation network. We compute the impulse response functions using the cross correlation, coherency and deconvolution techniques of the raw ambient seismic field and the cross correlation of 1-bit normalized data. To validate the amplitudes of the impulse response functions, we use a shallow M w 5.8 earthquake that occurred on the eastern edge of Kanto Basin and close to a station that is used as the virtual source. Both S and surface waves are retrieved in the causal part of the impulse response functions computed with all the different techniques. However, the amplitudes obtained from the deconvolution method agree better with those of the earthquake. Despite the expected wave attenuation due to the soft sediments of the Kanto Basin, seismic amplification caused by the basin geometry dominates the amplitudes of S and surface waves and is captured by the ambient seismic field. To test whether or not the anticausal part of the impulse response functions from deconvolution also contains reliable amplitude information, we use another virtual source located on the western edge of the basin. We show that the surface wave amplitudes of the anticausal part agree well with those of a shallow M w 4.7 event that occurred close to the virtual source. This study demonstrates that the deconvolution technique seems to be the best strategy to retrieve reliable relative amplitudes from the ambient seismic field in the Kanto Basin.
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