Sheehan
Anne F.
Sheehan
Anne F.
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ArticleInterferometry of infragravity waves off New Zealand(John Wiley & Sons, 2014-02-18) Godin, Oleg A. ; Zabotin, Nikolay A. ; Sheehan, Anne F. ; Collins, John A.Wave interferometry is a remote sensing technique, which is increasingly employed in helioseismology, seismology, and acoustics to retrieve parameters of the propagation medium from two-point cross-correlation functions of random wavefields. Here we apply interferometry to yearlong records of seafloor pressure at 28 locations off New Zealand's South Island to investigate propagation and directivity properties of infragravity waves away from shore. A compressed cross-correlation function technique is proposed to make the interferometry of dispersive waves more robust, decrease the necessary noise averaging time, and simplify retrieval of quantitative information from noise cross correlations. The emergence of deterministic wave arrivals from cross correlations of random wavefields is observed up to the maximum range of 692 km between the pressure sensors in the array. Free, linear waves with a strongly anisotropic distribution of power flux density are found to be dominant in the infragravity wavefield. Lowest-frequency components of the infragravity wavefield are largely isotropic. The anisotropy has its maximum in the middle of the spectral band and decreases at the high-frequency end of the spectrum. Highest anisotropy peaks correspond to waves coming from portions of the New Zealand's shoreline. Significant contributions are also observed from waves propagating along the coastline and probably coming from powerful sources in the northeast Pacific. Infragravity wave directivity is markedly different to the east and to the west of the South Island. The northwest coast of the South Island is found to be a net source of the infragravity wave energy.
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PreprintMultibeam bathymetric surveys of submarine volcanoes and mega-pockmarks on the Chatham Rise, New Zealand( 2011-04) Collins, John A. ; Molnar, Peter H. ; Sheehan, Anne F.Multibeam bathymetric surveys east of the South Island of New Zealand present images of submarine volcanoes and pockmarks west of Urry Knolls on the Chatham Rise, and evidence of submarine erosion on the southern margin of the Chatham Rise. Among numerous volcanic cones, diameters of the largest reach ~2000 m, and some stand as high as 400 m above the surrounding seafloor. The tops of most of the volcanic cones are flat, with hints of craters, and some with asymmetric shapes may show flank collapses. There are hints of both northeast-southwest and northwest-southeast alignments of volcanoes, but no associated faulting is apparent. Near and to the west of these volcanoes, huge pockmarks, some more than ~1 km in diameter, disrupt bottom topography. Pockmarks in this region seem to be confined to sea floor shallower than ~1200 m, but we see evidence of deeper pockmarks at water depths of up to 2100 m on profiles crossing the Bounty Trough. The pockmark field on the Chatham Rise seems to be bounded on the south by a trough near 1200 m depth; like others, we presume that contour currents have eroded the margin and created the trough.
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ArticleLithospheric shear velocity structure of South Island, New Zealand, from amphibious Rayleigh wave tomography(John Wiley & Sons, 2016-05-23) Ball, Justin S. ; Sheehan, Anne F. ; Stachnik, Joshua C. ; Lin, Fan-Chi ; Yeck, William ; Collins, John A.We present a crust and mantle 3-D shear velocity model extending well offshore of New Zealand's South Island, imaging the lithosphere beneath the South Island as well as the Campbell and Challenger Plateaus. Our model is constructed via linearized inversion of both teleseismic (18–70 s period) and ambient noise-based (8–25 s period) Rayleigh wave dispersion measurements. We augment an array of 4 land-based and 29 ocean bottom instruments deployed off the South Island's east and west coasts in 2009–2010 by the Marine Observations of Anisotropy Near Aotearoa experiment with 28 land-based seismometers from New Zealand's permanent GeoNet array. Major features of our shear wave velocity (Vs) model include a low-velocity (Vs < 4.4 km/s) body extending from near surface to greater than 75 km depth beneath the Banks and Otago Peninsulas and high-velocity (Vs~4.7 km/s) mantle anomalies underlying the Southern Alps and off the northwest coast of the South Island. Using the 4.5 km/s contour as a proxy for the lithosphere-asthenosphere boundary, our model suggests that the lithospheric thickness of Challenger Plateau and central South Island is substantially greater than that of the inner Campbell Plateau. The high-velocity anomaly we resolve at subcrustal depths (>50 km) beneath the central South Island exhibits strong spatial correlation with upper mantle earthquake hypocenters beneath the Alpine Fault. The ~400 km long low-velocity zone we image beneath eastern South Island and the inner Bounty Trough underlies Cenozoic volcanics and the locations of mantle-derived helium measurements, consistent with asthenospheric upwelling in the region.
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ArticlePower spectra of infragravity waves in a deep ocean(John Wiley & Sons, 2013-05-29) Godin, Oleg A. ; Zabotin, Nikolay A. ; Sheehan, Anne F. ; Yang, Zhaohui ; Collins, John A.Infragravity waves (IGWs) play an important role in coupling wave processes in the ocean, ice shelves, atmosphere, and the solid Earth. Due to the paucity of experimental data, little quantitative information is available about power spectra of IGWs away from the shore. Here we use continuous, yearlong records of pressure at 28 locations on the seafloor off New Zealand's South Island to investigate spectral and spatial distribution of IGW energy. Dimensional analysis of diffuse IGW fields reveals universal properties of the power spectra observed at different water depths and leads to a simple, predictive model of the IGW spectra. While sources of IGWs off New Zealand are found to have a flat power spectrum, the IGW energy density has a pronounced dependence on frequency and local water depth as a result of the interaction of the waves with varying bathymetry.
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ArticleThe character of seafloor ambient noise recorded offshore New Zealand : results from the MOANA ocean bottom seismic experiment(American Geophysical Union, 2012-10-16) Yang, Zhaohui ; Sheehan, Anne F. ; Collins, John A. ; Laske, GabiWe analyze the characteristics of ambient noise recorded on ocean-bottom seismographs using data from the 2009–2010 MOANA (Marine Observations of Anisotropy Near Aotearoa) seismic experiment deployed west and east of South Island, New Zealand. Microseism and infragravity noise peaks are clear on data recorded on the vertical channel of the seismometer and on the pressure sensor. The noise levels in the infragravity band (<0.03 Hz) on the horizontal seismometer channels are too high to show the infragravity peak. There is a small difference (~0.25 Hz versus ~0.2 Hz) in microseism peak frequencies between the two sides of the South Island on all three seismic channels. Our results show clear depth dependence between the peak frequency of infragravity waves and the water depth. We find that the product of water depth and wave number at the peak frequency is a constant, koH = 1.5. This relationship can be used to determine the variation of phase and group velocity of infragravity waves with water depth, and the location of the infragravity peak and corresponding noise notch at any water depth. These estimates of spectral characteristics, particularly low noise bands, are useful for future OBS deployments.
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ArticleUpper mantle seismic anisotropy at a strike-slip boundary : South Island, New Zealand(John Wiley & Sons, 2014-02-05) Zietlow, Daniel W. ; Sheehan, Anne F. ; Molnar, Peter H. ; Savage, Martha K. ; Hirth, Greg ; Collins, John A. ; Hager, Bradford H.New shear wave splitting measurements made from stations onshore and offshore the South Island of New Zealand show a zone of anisotropy 100–200 km wide. Measurements in central South Island and up to approximately 100 km offshore from the west coast yield orientations of the fast quasi-shear wave nearly parallel to relative plate motion, with increased obliquity to this orientation observed farther from shore. On the eastern side of the island, fast orientations rotate counterclockwise to become nearly perpendicular to the orientation of relative plate motion approximately 200 km off the east coast. Uniform delay times between the fast and slow quasi-shear waves of nearly 2.0 s onshore continue to stations approximately 100 km off the west coast, after which they decrease to ~1 s at 200 km. Stations more than ~300 km from the west coast show little to no splitting. East coast stations have delay times around 1 s. Simple strain fields calculated from a thin viscous sheet model (representing distributed lithospheric deformation) with strain rates decreasing exponentially to both the northwest and southeast with e-folding dimensions of 25–35 km (approximately 75% of the deformation within a zone 100–140 km wide) match orientations and amounts of observed splitting. A model of deformation localized in the lithosphere and then spreading out in the asthenosphere also yields predictions consistent with observed splitting if, at depths of 100–130 km below the lithosphere, typical grain sizes are ~ 6–7 mm.
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ArticleA joint Monte Carlo analysis of seafloor compliance, Rayleigh wave dispersion and receiver functions at ocean bottom seismic stations offshore New Zealand(John Wiley & Sons, 2014-12-17) Ball, Justin S. ; Sheehan, Anne F. ; Stachnik, Joshua C. ; Lin, Fan-Chi ; Collins, John A.Teleseismic body-wave imaging techniques such as receiver function analysis can be notoriously difficult to employ on ocean-bottom seismic data due largely to multiple reverberations within the water and low-velocity sediments. In lieu of suppressing this coherently scattered noise in ocean-bottom receiver functions, these site effects can be modeled in conjunction with shear velocity information from seafloor compliance and surface wave dispersion measurements to discern crustal structure. A novel technique to estimate 1-D crustal shear-velocity profiles from these data using Monte Carlo sampling is presented here. We find that seafloor compliance inversions and P-S conversions observed in the receiver functions provide complimentary constraints on sediment velocity and thickness. Incoherent noise in receiver functions from the MOANA ocean bottom seismic experiment limit the accuracy of the practical analysis at crustal scales, but synthetic recovery tests and comparison with independent unconstrained nonlinear optimization results affirm the utility of this technique in principle.
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ArticleS-wave splitting in the offshore South Island, New Zealand : insights into plate-boundary deformation(John Wiley & Sons, 2015-08-30) Karalliyadda, Sapthala C. ; Savage, Martha K. ; Sheehan, Anne F. ; Collins, John A. ; Zietlow, Daniel W. ; Shelley, AdrianLocal and regional S-wave splitting in the offshore South Island of the New Zealand plate-boundary zone provides constraints on the spatial and depth extent of the anisotropic structure with an enhanced resolution relative to land-based and SKS studies. The combined analysis of offshore and land measurements using splitting tomography suggests plate-boundary shear dominates in the central and northern South Island. The width of this shear zone in the central South Island is about 200 km, but is complicated by stress-controlled anisotropy at shallow levels. In northern South Island, a broader (>200 km) zone of plate-boundary parallel anisotropy is associated with the transitional faulting between the Alpine fault and Hikurangi subduction and the Hikurangi subduction zone itself. These results suggest S-phases of deep events (∼90 km) in the central South Island are sensitive to plate-boundary derived NE-SW aligned anisotropic media in the upper-lithosphere, supporting a “thin viscous sheet” deformation model.