Evaluation of gravity data by using artificial neural networks case study: Seferihisar geothermal area (Western Turkey)

Artificial neural networks (ANN) have been used in a variety of problems in the fields of science and engineering. Applications of ANN to the geophysical problems have increased within the last decade. In particular, it has been used to solve such inversion problems as seismic, electromagnetic, resistivity. There are also some other applications such as parameter estimation, prediction, and classification. In this study, multilayer perceptron neural networks (MLPNN) and radial basis function neural networks (RBFNN) were applied to synthetic gravity data and Seferihisar gravity data to investigate the applicability and performance of these networks for the method of gravity. Additionally performance of MLPNN and RBFNN were tested by adding random noise to the same synthetic test data. The structure parameters, such as the depths, the density contrasts, and the locations of the structures were obtained closely for different signal-to-noise ratios (S/N). Bouguer data of Seferihisar area were analyzed by MLPNN and RBFNN to estimate depth, density contrast, and location of the structure. The results of MLPNN, RBFNN, and classical inversion method were compared for real data obtained from Seferihisar Geothermal area and similar structure parameters were obtained. The experiments show that in general RBFNN not only increases the speed of the training stage enormously, but also provides slightly better performance.     

Strike-slip motions in the Gulf of Siğaçik (western Turkey): Properties of the 17 October 2005 earthquake seismic sequence

The October 2005 series of earthquakes that occurred in the Gulf of Siğaçik (western Turkey) reveal the operation of pure strike-slip faults, as evidenced from the 49 focal mechanisms we determined, in a region dominated by N–S extension and bounded by well-documented graben structures. The sequence is characterized by the occurrence of three moderate size events (17 October 2005, 05:45 UTC, Mw 5.4; 17 October 2005, 09:46 UTC, Mw 5.8; and 20 October 2005, 21:40 UTC, Mw 5.8) with an eastward propagation and close spatial separation (< 6 km). We relocated over 200 aftershocks, combining phases from the Greek and Turkish seismological networks, which align roughly in a NE–SW cloud, but considerably spread after the first day of the sequence, indicating the simultaneous activation of multiple structures nearly orthogonal to the main rupture. It is hard to relate the occurrence of the events to any of the previously mapped faults in the region. The region of occurrence is a well-known geothermal area which implies that it is in a very unstable state, with the fault systems close to rupture and very sensitive to stress perturbations. Here we showed that the sequence is adequately explained by static stress triggering. It is worth noting that this sequence, though moderate in magnitudes, provides stronger evidence for the operation of sub-parallel strike-slip faults in the central Aegean Sea–western Turkey, north of the volcanic arc, which seem to be optimally oriented in the regional stress field and facilitate the Anatolia motion into the Aegean Sea.