Resumen de Tomographic images of the Mediterranean basin obtained by spatial prediction (kriging)

José Ignacio Badal Nicolás, Javier Sabadell, Francisco José Serón Arbeloa

• The purpose of this work is to give briefly an overall view of the shear wave velocity structure of the lithosphere-asthenosphere system beneath the Mediterranean basin, providing new tomographic images obtained through a method of spatial prediction applied to a common database. The starting data are path-averaged Rayleigh-wave group velocities previously determined by standard digital filtering, and then inverted by a damped least-squares. We use an interpolation method as kriging, especially useful for analysing short-range variability between scattered points. The results are shown by means of characteristic seismic velocities belonging to a prefixed interval, and horizontal slices at increasing reference depths down to 200 km. The method has allowed us to constrain the sharply contrasting seismic velocity structure between neighbouring areas of the Mediterranean. The images reveal significant variations in velocity with depth, and lateral changes in the crust and uppermost mantle elastic structure emphasising the processes associated with the convergence of the Eurasian and African plates