Applications of seismic pattern recognition and gravity inversion techniques to obtain enhanced subsurface images of the Earth's crust under the Central Metasedimentary Belt, Grenville Province, Ontario

Abstract

Project Lithoprobe's Abitibi-Grenville transect seismic reflection lines 32 and 33 traverse the exposed Central Metasedimentary Belt (CMB) located in the Grenville province of the Precambrian Shield of Canada in southern Ontario. These seismic lines image a zone with a protracted deformational history spanning more than 300 Myr. Detailed examination of the commercially processed stacked sections reveals a number of significant deficiencies in some important areas. The image quality in these zones of reduced coherency needs to be enhanced to examine specific features and their relation to the surface geology. Examination of near-vertical seismic data from Lines 32 and 33 revealed that the signal-to-noise ratio was not improved by stacking, due to misalignment of signals even after static, normal moveout corrections and residual static corrections. The presumed reason is that reflected seismic energy following long ray paths in heterogenous media suffers from relative advances and delays in its propagation, and hence arrives at slightly different times at the receivers, tending to be poorly aligned relative to its theoretical traveltime curves. A pattern recognition (PR) method for signal enhancement followed by energy stacking in moving time windows was used in this study to improve the images in spite of misalignments. Reprocessing has refined the geometry of the reflection profiles. The objective of this paper is to use enhanced images of the seismic reflection data obtained by using a PR approach together with gravity data, using 2.5-D forward and 3-D inversion routines, to give an improved model of subsurface structure in the vicinity of lines 32 and 33. Line 32 is dominated by southeast-dipping reflectors soling into the lower crust. The listric geometry of the strong reflection packages of the CMB boundary thrust zone is interpreted to represent a crustal-scale ramp-flat geometry that accommodated northwest-directed tectonic transport of the CMB. This interpretation is also supported by the gravity data.