Seismic anisotropy and its impact on imaging the shallow Alpine Fault : an experimental and modeling perspective.

The transpressional Alpine Fault in New Zealand has created a thick shear zone with associated highly anisotropic rocks. Low seismic velocity zones (LVZ) and high seismic reflectivity are recorded in the Alpine Fault Zone, but no study has explored the underlying physical rock parameters of the shallow crust that control these observations. Protomylonites are the volumetrically dominant lithology of the fault zone. Here we combine experimental measurements of P‐wave speeds with numerical models of elastic wave anisotropy of protomylonite samples to explore how the fault zone can be seismically imaged. Numerical models that account for the porosity‐free real samples' fabric elastic tensors f…