A New Approach for Shallow Subsurface Imaging and its Application to the Dead Sea Sinkhole Problem

Zero-offset CSP stacking and diffraction imaging constitute complementary methods to reveal useful information about the subsurface. As an illustration, this approach has been applied on the Ghor Al-Haditha sinkholes site (Jordan), on which the seismic surface-wave profiling technique has been previously performed. Surface-wave dispersion inversion results presented strong lateral variations, characterized by low shear-wave velocity anomalies, correlated with the proximity of existing sinkholes and the currently most active collapsing zone. Such anomalies have been explained by a systematic decompaction of shallow sediment layers during the sinkhole development process. Diffraction imaging sections computed from these surface-wave profiling data appear to correlate with dispersion inversion results in terms of lateral variations. CSP stacked sections make it possible to enhance deeper structures, possibly related to compacted sediments