New Insights into the Adria lithosphere from Joint Inversion of Teleseismic and Ambient-Noise Surface-Wave Dispersion

The central Mediterranean’s complex tectonic evolution is driven by the geodynamic interplay of the Adriatic microplate within the Eurasian-African convergence. Adria plays a pivotal role in the development of the surrounding orogenic systems, including the Alps, Apennines, Dinarides, and Hellenides.

So far, the sparse seismic station coverage in the western Balkans and eastern Mediterranean has limited the resolution of the tomographic models throughout that area. Today,  with the deployment of the dense, high quality, AdriaArray network, the improved seismic coverage affords an unprecedented opportunity to image the lithospheric and mantle structure beneath Adria. These images provide new constraints on the mechanisms governing the complex double-sided subduction of Adria, particularly beneath the Dinarides and the Albanides–Hellenides system, where several key geodynamic questions remain debated and unsolved.

Here, we present the results of a preliminary analysis of continuous seismic data recorded at more than 1,500 stations, with the aim of inferring a new three-dimensional shear-wave velocity model. Using SeisLib, a Python framework developed by Magrini et al. (2022),  we extracted teleseismic and ambient noise surface-wave dispersion curves and then inverted them jointly to obtain phase velocity and group velocity maps for Rayleigh and Love waves over a wide time range (3–150 s). Through a Bayesian-probabilistic inversion approach (Magrini et al., 2025), the dispersion maps are converted into a large-scale, high-resolution 3D Vs model. In this framework, multiple data types with complementary sensitivity are inverted jointly, yielding a new image and a more robust characterization of the Adria lithosphere.