The Cryosphere, 15, 283–302, 2021 https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-15-283-2021 © Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. Passive seismic recording of cryoseisms in Adventdalen, Svalbard Rowan Romeyn1,2, Alfred Hanssen1,2, Bent Ole Ruud2,3, Helene Meling Stemland2,3, and Tor Arne Johansen2,3,4 1Department of Geosciences, University of Tromsø – The Arctic University of Norway, 9037 Tromsø, Norway 2Research Centre for Arctic Petroleum Exploration (ARCEx), 9037 Tromsø, Norway 3Department of Earth Science, University of Bergen, 5007 Bergen, Norway 4The University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS), 9171 Longyearbyen, Norway Correspondence: Rowan Romeyn (
[email protected]) Received: 20 May 2020 – Discussion started: 25 June 2020 Revised: 30 October 2020 – Accepted: 7 December 2020 – Published: 20 January 2021 Abstract. A series of transient seismic events were discov- 1 Introduction ered in passive seismic recordings from 2-D geophone ar- rays deployed at a frost polygon site in Adventdalen, Sval- ◦ bard. These events contain a high proportion of surface wave Permafrost is defined as ground that remains at or below 0 C energy and produce high-quality dispersion images using for at least 2 consecutive years (French, 2017). On Svalbard, an apparent offset re-sorting and inter-trace delay minimi- an archipelago located in the climatic polar tundra zone (Kot- sation technique to locate the seismic source, followed by tek et al., 2006), at least 90 % of the land surface area not cross-correlation beamforming dispersion imaging. The dis- covered by glaciers is underlain by laterally continuous per- persion images are highly analogous to surface wave stud- mafrost (Christiansen et al., 2010; Humlum et al., 2003).