← Back to Gallery

Distributed Acoustic Sensing-based Joint Inversion for the Structure of the Reykjanes Peninsula, Iceland

Iceland’s Reykjanes Peninsula experiences episodic volcanism separated by hundreds of years of quiescence and has recently entered a period of renewed activity. The peninsula sits on an obliquely spreading boundary between the North American and Eurasian plates. This transtensional stress regime biases the geometry of volcanic and geologic structures, which take on a northeast-southwest strike in their surface expression. We image subsurface structures, leveraging a 100 km distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) array, eleven permanent broadband stations, and a temporary nodal deployment to perform a joint body and surface wave tomography. Moving from the surface to about 5 km depth, we observe a broad transition from seismic anomalies which take on the aforementioned NE-SW strike towards alignment with the plate boundary. These plate-boundary-aligned anomalies are interpreted as thermally driven, and capturing their variation along the boundary may aid an understanding of the temperature character of the peninsula. Further, the shallow crust sees a low velocity zone aligned with recent eruption-feeding dikes, which may illuminate aspects of the intrusion and eruption process. In better characterizing these structures, we highlight the value of DAS in efficiently imaging the subsurface at high resolution.

Session: Fiber-Optic Sensing Applications in Seismology and Environmental Science - II

Type: Oral

Room: Ballroom E

Date: 4/17/2026

Presentation Time: 08:45 AM (local time)

Presenting Author: Eli Bird

Student Presenter: Yes

Invited Presentation: 

Poster Number:

Additional Authors