Probabilistic ambient noise imaging of the Macquarie Ridge Complex using ocean-bottom and land-based seismometers

The Macquarie Ridge Complex, located at the boundary between Indo-Australian and Pacific plates in the southwest Pacific Ocean, hosts the largest sub-marine earthquakes in the 20^th century, not associated with ongoing subduction. We deployed 27 ocean-bottom seismometers, of which 15 have been recovered successfully, to understand the origin of the sub-marine earthquakes and their potential earthquake and tsunami hazards to Australia and New Zealand. Additionally, we deployed five land-based seismometers on Macquarie Island.

We explore state-of-the-art processing methods to analyze the new seismic dataset from the retrieved seismic stations. One of the goals is to image the tectonic settings beneath the MRC. Here, we present a first-order tomographic model and its relevant uncertainty estimate of the region constructed from ambient noise surface waves using a probabilistic inversion framework. The tomographic image will be complemented with receiver-based imaging results such as those from P-wave coda autocorrelations and receiver functions to confirm the existence of possible geometries. The results are expected to supply a fresh understanding of the tectonic settings under the MRC and unpuzzle the origin of the significant underwater earthquakes in the 20th century.