Attenuation in Southeastern Carpathians area: Result of upper mantle inhomogeneity

The systematic analysis of seismograms recorded on the Romanian territory using Vrancea intermediate-depth earthquakes shows a strong asymmetric pattern relative to the epicentral area: on one side, in the Transylvanian Basin and the Eastern Carpathians (approximately along the inner volcanic chain), the amplitudes are reduced by a factor of 20 on average and the high frequencies are attenuated, in contrast with the other side, in the foreland platform. This pattern is explained by a significant attenuation increase caused by a strong lateral variation of the structure in the upper mantle, immediately towards NW of the Vrancea seismic active volume. This region corresponds to the most recent volcanic activity in the Persani Mountains and with the low-velocity body adjacent toward NW to the high-velocity body subducted beneath Vrancea area as indicated by seismic tomography and heat flow results. The CALIXTO'99 tomography experiment, deployed for 6 months in 1999, provides the largest number of observations for Vrancea earthquakes ever recorded on the Romanian territory. We select data from 8 earthquakes generated in this time interval in the Vrancea nest, which were recorded with signal / noise ratio greater than 5 by at least 25 stations. All of them are small- to moderate-magnitude events (3.6 ≤ Mw ≤ 4.2). The attenuation is much more important in the high-frequency range (> 1 Hz), than at low frequencies. Since the large Vrancea earthquakes can radiate significant energy in the low-frequency range (< 1 Hz), our results show that the seismic hazard level is much more uniform all over the Romanian territory in the low-frequency range than in the high-frequency range.