First seismic imaging results of tectonically complex structures at shallow depths beneath the northwest Canterbury Plains, New Zealand

Seismogenic structures underlie many regions of the vast Canterbury Plains on the South Island of New Zealand. Most of these structures are hidden beneath a layer of rapidly deposited Late Pleistocene sediments, the youth and thickness of which make the general application of conventional paleoseismological studies impractical. In an attempt to improve our understanding of potentially active structures in this region, we have acquired, processed and interpreted shallow seismic reflection data across the northwest Canterbury Plains. To separate the useful reflected signals from unusually high amplitude ambient and source-generated noise, we subjected the data to a specially tailored processing scheme that included time- and space-variant spectral balancing, custom static corrections and mutes, F-X deconvolution, DMO corrections and finite-difference migration. The final stacked and migrated seismic sections supply high-resolution images of the basement and overlying layered Cretaceous- to Quaternary-age supracrustal rocks that have been complexly faulted and folded. At one location, the uppermost Late Pleistocene layers appear to have been gently buckled.