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The Heterogeneity of the Crust and its Effect on Seismic Wide-Angle Reflection Fields

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Heterogeneity in the Crust and Upper Mantle

Abstract

During the past 90 years, our conceptual image of the Earth’s crust has gradually evolved from that of a simple one or two layered crust (e.g., Mohorovičić, 1910; Conrad, 1925; Jeffereys, 1926; Hodgson, 1953), to multi-layered crusts (e.g., McCamy and Meyer, 1966; Mueller, 1977; Sandmeier and Wenzel, 1986; Stephenson et al., 1989), to highly complex morphologies with fractal characteristics (e.g., Nikolajev and Tregub, 1970; Mereu and Ojo 1981; Frankel and Clayton, 1986; Levander and Holliger, 1992; Goff and Levander, 1996). This change has occurred as a result of a revolution in both seismic data acquisition technology (e.g., Berry and Mair, 1977; Brown et al., 1980; Meissner, 1986; Mooney and Brocher, 1987) and computational technology (e.g., Fuchs and Muller, 1971; Kelly et al.,1976; McMechan and Mooney, 1980; Červený and Psençik, 1984; White, 1989; Zelt and Smith, 1992). Much of the current information about crustal structure has come from numerous controlled-source seismic refraction and reflection experiments. These have been described in many published works over the past 40 years (e.g., Steinhart and Smith, 1966; Barazangi and Brown, 1986a,b; Mathews and Smith, 1987; Meissner et al.,1991; Klemperer and Mooney, 1998).

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  1. Department of Earth Sciences, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, N6A 5B7, Canada

    Robert Mereu

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  1. Institute for Geophysics, University of Texas, Austin, Texas, USA

    John A. Goff

  2. Institute of Geophysics, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, Switzerland

    Klaus Holliger

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Mereu, R. (2003). The Heterogeneity of the Crust and its Effect on Seismic Wide-Angle Reflection Fields. In: Goff, J.A., Holliger, K. (eds) Heterogeneity in the Crust and Upper Mantle. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-0103-9_10

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