Dispersão das ondas de Rayleigh na Plataforma Sulamericana

Abstract

This work represents a dispersion study of the vertical component of the Rayleigh wave with trajectories on the South American platform. The records used are from stations located in the Brazilian territory such as the ones from Rio de Janeiro (RDJ), Caicó (CAI), Brasília (BDF) and Belém (BEB). These are the only seismological stations in Brazil with long period sensors that can be useful for the dispersion studies in the interval 4 to 50 seconds. The earthquakes used are localized along the eastern part of Andean mountain belt and inside the South American platform, with tipically continental trajectories. 34 events were selected using the following pratical criteria: the localization, the magnitude mb, the depth, and that they occured in the period of January 1978 to June 1987. The dispersion study done here means the determination of group velocities and spectral amplitudes, corresponding to the fundamental and first higher modes. Normally the modes of second order or more are rarely observed. Two types of measurements were made: (i) group velocity versus period and (ii) spectral amplitude versus period. Dispersion studies are important for determining the structure of the crust and upper mantle which are directly related to gelogical phenomena. In this work, regionalization is defined as the identification of different forms of dispersion curves and their relation to the epicenter-station trajectory on the South American platform. We also correlate them geologicaly, as described in item 4.3 of this work. The distribution of epicenters occurs from the extreme South of Argentina to the extreme North of Venezuela, with the objective of iniciating with this work a sistematic study of the sub-Andean area in our institution. Three distinct types of curves were observed in 27 trajectories and grouped in three families (1, 2 and 3). Their forms were compared with the regional geological features of South American platform. The multiple filter technique was used to obtain the dispersion curves (Dziewonski et al 1969). This filter has the property of separating the modes through their group velocities for each frequency selected and also recovers the espectral amplitudes characteristic for each harmonic (Herrmann, 1973). The theorectical development of the filter properties as well as the limitations and aplicabilities are treated by Dziewonski et al (1972). As part of this work there was the implementation, adaptions and the layout of fluxograms of the multiple filter software, as well as the digitalization procedure for data processing and non-automatic interpretation of the results.