Environmental seismology: What can we learn on earth surface processes with ambient noise?

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jappgeo.2015.02.001Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Ambient seismic noise based monitoring reveals feeble perturbations of the subsurface.

  • Mechanical perturbations are related to temperature, stress, hydrological changes, or to damage.

  • Seismic noise from rivers and glaciers reveal new sources of seismic activity.

  • Glacier and fluvial seismology shed a new light on the mechanical process at work.

Abstract

Environmental seismology consists in studying the mechanical vibrations that originate from, or that have been affected by external causes, that is to say causes outside the solid Earth. This includes for instance the coupling between the solid Earth and the cryosphere, or the hydrosphere, the anthroposphere and the specific sources of vibration developing there. Environmental seismology also addresses the modifications of the wave propagation due to environmental forcing such as temperature and hydrology. Recent developments in data processing, together with increasing computational power and sensor concentration have led to original observations that allow for the development of this new field of seismology. In this article, we will particularly review how we can track and interpret tiny changes in the subsurface of the Earth related to external changes from modifications of the seismic wave propagation, with application to geomechanics, hydrology, and natural hazard. We will particularly demonstrate that, using ambient noise, we can track 1) thermal variations in the subsoil, in buildings or in rock columns; 2) the temporal and spatial evolution of a water table; 3) the evolution of the rigidity of the soil constituting a landslide, and especially the drop of rigidity preceding a failure event.

Section snippets

What is environmental seismology?

Seismology has long been considered to be the primary source of information on the structure of the Earth, and deep Earth studies have raised a broad scientific interest. From the arrival times, amplitudes, polarizations of refracted and reflected waves, one can deduce the structure of the Earth, which relates to its geological composition (Astiz et al., 1996, Shearer, 2009). Based on these observations, seismologists have produced 1D, 2D and 3D cartographies of the Earth at various scales. At

Ambient noise spectrum

One of the very common features of ambient noise that any seismologist can exploit is the frequency content of the record. This frequency content depends on the spectrum illuminated by the sources, which in practice cover all the seismic frequencies from a few milli-Hertz to several hundreds of Hertz, but also depends on the attenuation of the waves along their trajectories, and on local effects such as structural and geometrical structuration of the sub-surface. The power spectrum density is

Theoretical and experimental background

Seismic or acoustic wave velocities in solids and fluids are well known to vary with temperature. For instance water has a thermal relative velocity change coefficient dV/V/dT of + 3.310 3/°C, and dry air + 2 10 3/°C, which represents an increase of velocity with increasing temperature. In rocks and other aggregates like concrete, this coefficient has negative values of the order of + 2 · 10 3/°C (Snieder et al., 2002, Larose et al., 2006c).

The subsurface undergoes at least two kinds of thermal

Hydrological forcing

The Utiku landslide (New Zealand) has been monitored over the last 40 years by the Institute of Geological and Nuclear Science (GNS Science) because its movements impair the Highway 1 integrity as well as the North Island Main Trunk railway line. Permanent GPS stations record the displacement field on a daily basis (Massey and McSaveney, 2013). They are accompanied by piezometers that are located next to the seismometers, and that record the water table level on an hourly basis. Six seismic

Landslide

Ambient seismic noise monitoring gives directly access to the relative velocity change within the material, which is mostly a relative velocity change for the shear wave. The source of this relative velocity change can therefore either be a change of density, or of rigidity. We thus stress that a drop in the rigidity of the material constituting a landslide could induce a drop in dV/V during the slope failure. This idea was tested on a small but very active landslide located next to Les

Vibrations in the ice

With the advent of digital and portable instrumentation, analysis of seismic sources in glacial ice has moved into the focus of environmental seismology. Perhaps most importantly, seismic monitoring has revealed that at least part of glacier and ice stream sliding occurs as sudden stick-slip events, analogous to earthquake faulting (Allstadt and Malone, 2008, Wiens et al., 2008). Whereas seismic source studies have dominated the cryosphere component of environmental seismology, investigations

Conclusion

In this article, we reviewed different aspects of a rapidly developing field of seismology, which we can call environmental seismology. We presented a series of experiments that took benefit of ambient seismic vibrations to monitor the changes in the mechanical properties of the subsurface, or to identify new sources of seismic signals that occur outside the solid Earth.

The evolution of the mechanical properties is related either to the resonant frequencies of modal structure, or to the

Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge fundings from the VOR program (Université J. Fourier), the ERC Adv. Grant Whisper 227507, and the Labex OSUG@2020 (ANR10 LABX56). We acknowledge help from Peter Moore for drawing Fig. 11.

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