Shallow crustal structure of the northern Longmen Shan fault zone revealed by a dense seismic array with ambient noise analysis

The Longmen Shan (LMS) fault zone located in the southwest of China is not only the boundary tectonic zone of the Tibetan Plateau and South China block, but also an important part of the north–south seismic belt of China. To investigate the detailed crustal structure of the LMS fault zone, we deployed a dense seismic array of 151 short-period temporary stations in its northern section from March 16 to April 6, 2023. Continuous vertical component ambient noise waveforms recorded by these stations were cross-correlated for all station pairs, enabling the extraction of Rayleigh wave phase velocity dispersion curves across periods ranging from 0.5 s to 6 s. We then inverted these data to derive the crustal shear wave velocity using direct surface wave tomography. Meanwhile, a linear sub-array consisting of 54 stations and crossing the surface rupture of the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake was used to image the fault structure by applying the Transmitted Surface Wave Reverse Time Migration method (TSW-RTM). The ambient noise tomography results show that strong lateral heterogeneity exists in the shallow crust in the study area, with a high shear velocity in the northwest and a low shear velocity in the southeast. The low shear velocity is generally distributed between the Yingxiu-Beichuan fault (YBF) and the Guanxian-Jiangyou fault (GJF). The results of TSW-RTM indicate that the Wenchuan-Maoxian fault (WMF) and the YBF are both characterized with a steep dip to the northwest. Our results could serve as the important basis for the study of segmentation characteristics of the LMS fault and seismic hazard preparation and mitigation.